Bruce Springsteen is the master of the pen. Throughout his career, he’s crafted an incredibly vast number of conjoined words which have profoundly affected his devoted legion of fans. Even now, while 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 foolproof strategy, which has served him well despite its chaotic nature.
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.
Meanwhile, during the keynote speech at SXSW in 2012, Springsteen explained why there is no secret to songwriting and claimed hard work is the only way to improve. He told the crowd: “Whether you’re making dance music, Americana, rap music, electronica, it’s all about how you are putting what you do together. The elements you’re using don’t matter. Purity of human expression and experience is not confined to guitars, to tubes, to turntables, to microchips. There is no right way, no pure way, of doing it. There’s just doing it.”
While Springsteen doesn’t have a regimented approach to songwriting, he works hard at his craft, and his methods unquestionably acquire incredible results. 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, who the listener completely buys into due to the authentic emotion delivered by Bruce.
Speaking to the Sunday Times about the lyric, Springsteen said: “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.’”
Although Springsteen was in the fourth decade of his career when he wrote ‘Girls In Their Summer Clothes’, the song proved he retained the magical touch and could tell stories in a way that most songwriters could only dream of doing themselves. There’s a simplicity to the line, too, but the direct nature of the lyric only makes it even more powerful.
Listen to ‘Girls In Their Summer Clothes’ below.
