Bruce Springsteen at 77: the boss still has more stories to tell

On September 23, 1949, Bruce Springsteen was born at Monmouth Medical Center in Long Branch, New Jersey.
He would grow up in nearby Freehold, a place that would become inseparable from the mythology of his music, even though the line “I was born right here on Randolph Street in Freehold” from “My Hometown” is not literally true.
There is an even more curious detail attached to the day of his birth: the local newspapers actually misspelled the family name as “Springstein” in the birth announcement.

By the time he was twenty, he had already spent almost a decade learning the hard way what it meant to be a working musician.
Before there was an E Street Band, there were a succession of local groups with names such as The Castiles, Steel Mill and Dr. Zoom & the Sonic Boom. The venues were hardly glamorous. His early bands played bars, private parties, firemen’s balls, a roller rink, a drive-in, a supermarket parking lot and even a state mental hospital. Those years around the Jersey Shore were not merely a prelude to fame: they were the laboratory in which Springsteen developed the marathon live performances that would eventually become his trademark.

His first album, Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J., arrived in January 1973. Although musicians who would later become members of the E Street Band — including Clarence Clemons, David Sancious and Garry Tallent — played on it, the record was initially presented as a solo project. One of its songs, “Blinded by the Light”, would later become a No. 1 hit for Manfred Mann’s Earth Band, giving Springsteen one of the more unusual songwriting stories in rock history: the writer himself never had a hit with his own recording of the song, while another band took it to the top of the charts.

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Then came Born to Run.
Released on August 25, 1975, his third studio album transformed the scale of his ambitions. It was also a record made under enormous pressure after his first two albums had failed to become major commercial successes.
The sessions at the Record Plant produced the eight tracks that eventually made the album, but also a wealth of material that remained unreleased for decades.
In 2025, as part of the album’s 50th anniversary celebrations, “Lonely Night in the Park”, recorded during those sessions and seriously considered for inclusion at the time, finally received its first official release.
That relationship with his own archives has become one of the most fascinating parts of his later career.
In 2025, Tracks II: The Lost Albums opened an extraordinary vault containing seven previously unreleased full-length albums, 83 songs in total, 74 of them never previously released in any form. Some of those records had been completed, and in some cases mixed, years earlier.
He had simply kept them.

And apparently the vault is not empty yet.

Just days ago, he revealed that he currently has two new albums in the works.
One is already finished; the other is still being completed, but he believes its material should come out first.
When asked whether the records were solo projects or recordings with the E Street Band, he offered the most Springsteen-like answer possible: “It’s a surprise.” He also said that, after years of extensive touring, he no longer imagines another enormous 140-date E Street Band tour, preferring shorter runs of perhaps 20 or 30 shows.
It is a remarkably fitting situation for an artist whose career has always been built around the idea that there is another road to travel, another story to tell and another song somewhere just beyond the horizon.

There is also a lovely coincidence attached to Bruce Springsteen’s birthday itself.
On September 23, 2016 — his 67th birthday — Chapter and Verse was released as the musical companion to his autobiography Born to Run.
The 18-track collection began with recordings by The Castiles, featuring a teenage Bruce on guitar and vocals, and followed his journey through Steel Mill, the early Bruce Springsteen Band, the E Street years and beyond.
Five of its tracks had never previously been released.

And perhaps that is the most appropriate way to look at Bruce Springsteen at 77. The mythology is already enormous: the Jersey Shore, the boardwalks of Asbury Park, the battered cars and restless characters, the E Street Band, Born to Run, Darkness on the Edge of Town, The River, Nebraska, Born in the U.S.A., The Rising and decades of concerts in which the clock has often seemed almost irrelevant.

But Bruce Springsteen has never seemed particularly interested in treating his own past as a museum.
There are still songs in the archives. There are still new records being made. There are still concerts he wants to play.
And somewhere, apparently, there are already two more albums waiting for their turn.
On September 23, 1949, a boy from New Jersey was born.
Seventy-seven years later, the Boss still isn’t finished.