(Credits: Wise Owl Films)
Wed 1 April 2026 21:30, UK
There’s a certain magic that comes with making a great Bruce Springsteen song.
‘The Boss’ was never going to phone it in whenever making his tunes, and even when he was creating characters to fill out the world of records like Born to Run, he felt that he needed the right kind of lyric to help sell every single emotion that he felt. No one was going to be able to relate to stories that were about the simple pleasures in life if they were merely “good”, but there was a lot more behind making a heartland rock song with a bit of romance to it.
Because when it comes to rock and roll, playing up the ‘badass in love’ schtick isn’t always going to work. There are many times where people can end up looking like an absolute idiot trying to play up their romance, and when you’re going for a rock and roll love song, you’d hope that it has the same kind of charm that Paul and Linda McCartney had in Wings rather than whatever the hell was going on with Gregg Allman and Cher when they made a record together.
And while Springsteen did eventually find his other half in one of the members of his band, a lot of his love songs all seemed to have a tinge of sadness to them as well. It’s no secret that Tunnel of Love was always about his marriage falling apart, but some of the tunes that he wrote in the Born to Run were always romantic because of how he framed everything. He wasn’t sure whether the dreams he talked about were going to work out, but he was determined to see if love was real in ‘Born to Run’ or whether there was a better life waiting for them at the end of ‘Thunder Road’.
But whenever Springsteen was writing about the opposite sex, he was never trying to overtly talk about love. He wasn’t the kind to write meatheaded songs about girls, and even if he did have tunes that were a bit more sexual than others, you could tell that half of the fun of a song like ‘Pink Cadillac’ was about talking about his love of vintage cars and him being able to channel his inner Elvis Presley.
If you look at what his contemporaries were doing, though, Tom Petty was never looking to make songs that were overtly about sex, drugs and rock and roll, either. I know it’s a bold statement for many classic rock fans to dare to ask the question ‘What if women actually had personalities,’ but once they actually bothered to learn something about the characters in ‘American Girl’ and ‘Free Fallin’, there was a lot more depth for everyone to get behind.
And even with all of Springsteen’s famous love songs, what knocked him out is how Petty wrote about women, saying, “That was unique about what he did. It was an unusual way to go, and those were some of his most beautiful songs. ‘Here Comes My Girl’ was one of my all-time favorites. Of course ‘American Girl,’ but also ‘Free Fallin’ – it’s a song with a girl as the protagonist. He did something unique in that.”
But the fact that they work so well is because of seeing the other person’s perspective. Usually, all that any artist tends to focus on is the traditional heartbreaker mentality of breaking girls’ hearts all over the world, but you could hear the depth in every one of Petty’s songs. ‘Here Comes My Girl’ is the picture of domestic bliss, and even in some of his lower lights, you get a tragic picture of a relationship in its bitter end stages when looking through every single line of ‘Echo’.
Petty didn’t start his career trying to talk about romance exclusively, but when looking at how he painted a lot of his female characters, they were never just meant to be objects of affection. These felt like living, breathing people that you could have met walking down the street, and while not all of their stories had the best outcome, you could definitely feel their joy, pain, and everything in between with every single chord that he played.
