(Credits: Far Out / Danny Clinch / Bruce Springsteen)
Fri 17 October 2025 18:52, UK
Whether he’s on stage at Wembley Stadium or speaking in an interview, Bruce Springsteen has a way with words that connects straight to the heart.
Springsteen is a people’s poet who can eloquently cut through the bullshit and express feelings that cause folk from all walks of life to feel alive inside. It’s a rare skill that he possesses, and his catalogue of songs has been soundtracking lives around the world for decades.
Songwriting isn’t just a career for Springsteen; it’s what he was born to do. According to the Forbes Rich List, he’s now a billionaire (which he denied to be true), yet he has not lost the ability to speak about the issues and topics that truly matter to the average person on the street.
Even now that Springsteen is in the autumnal stages of life, he’s still consistently proving his songwriting credentials and showing why he’s called ‘The Boss’.
During a conversation with ABC’s Ted Koppel in 2002, Springsteen revealed his simple songwriting technique. Unlike many artists who focus on melody, Springsteen is a wordsmith, and he swears by his strategy, which has served him well despite its chaotic nature.
(Credits: Eric Meola)
Whenever an idea pops into his mind, Springsteen will reach for his pen and the spiral notebook, which he always has close to his person. “It’s just the book where I do my songwriting. It’s a general mess,” he commented on the process.
While this technique likely fails nine times out of ten, it has produced a canon of classics that have made him revered as an all-time great. Everybody reading this could likely pinpoint a single Springsteen lyric that means the most to them, whether this be the attention-grabbing, “Well, they blew up The Chicken Man in Philly last night,” in ‘Atlantic City’ or the simple, yet heartbreaking, “They’ll pass you by, glory days,” in ‘Glory Days’.
None of those lyrics is likely to win him a Pulitzer, but they run free in the minds of millions. Similarly, another one of his most impressive lyrics is ‘Girls In Their Summer Clothes’, which appeared on his 2007 album Magic and finds him looking back upon his youth with rose-tinted glasses.
The stand-out lyric from ‘Girls In Their Summer Clothes’ that epitomises the essence of the song is, “Things been a little tight, but I know they’re gonna turn my way”. It’s a line which successfully taps into a universal feeling while coming from the perspective of a three-dimensional narrator. The listener completely buys into it due to the authentic emotion delivered by Springsteen, and because it feels wholly real. For Springsteen, it’s a “perfect” line.
Speaking to the Sunday Times about the lyric, Springsteen proudly said of the creation: “I think people listening to that know who that guy is. I was interested in having a song where you get this classic image of a late summer, light on, in a small American town, and it’s perfect in a way that only occurs in pop songs – when the air is just right, where the sun’s sitting a certain way. And I subvert that at the end of the record with ‘Long Walk Home.’”
Springsteen was in the fourth decade of his career when he wrote ‘Girls In Their Summer Clothes’, but that ability to paint a cinematic picture with words is a gift he’s never lost. The song, while not one of his best-known creations, contains that same magical touch that made Springsteen the voice of his generation.
To this day, he can tell stories in a way that most songwriters could only dream of doing themselves. Like most of his work, the line isn’t complex, and the direct nature of the lyric only makes it more powerful on the ears.
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