As of this writing, Bruce Springsteen is in the middle of a string of arena shows in the New Jersey Meadowlands. This is a big deal in the state: Bruce Springsteen is New Jersey’s most famous son, and here in Monmouth County, nearly everyone has had an encounter or a connection with the man: My former coworker used to live next to the shack in Long Branch where he wrote the Born to Run album, and was on her porch one day when Bob Dylan stopped by the house on a musical pilgrimage. My wife’s uncle knew a girl that dated him back in the 70s, and he still maintains that Bruce was a “bum” and a “slob.” And countless friends have bumped into him in the gym, have been at the Stone Pony concert venue on a night when Bruce dropped in, or have looked to their left on the Garden State Parkway only to see the Boss riding alongside them on his motorcycle.

The relationship the state has with Bruce — and that Bruce has with the state — is complicated though. Because Bruce Springsteen is the bard of American working class angst and disappointment, and in his early life, he wanted nothing more desperately than to get out of New Jersey.

This is most evident in his breakout album, Born to Run. Bruce was raised in Freehold, New Jersey, and made a name for himself in the Asbury Park music scene as a young man before attracting the attention of record executives. He produced a few albums that were critically acclaimed but weren’t hugely successful, and Born to Run was what he saw as his last chance to break through to the big time. Bruce thought he could be something great, but the Jersey Shore was peppered with men who thought they’d be big, shot their shot, and missed. These men slunk back home, got factory jobs, and spent their nights drinking and reminiscing about better times.

So he poured every last ounce of himself into the production of Born to Run. “Everything was on the line for him,” Springsteen's biographer Peter Ames Carlin told the publication The Week, “he was either going to continue living his dream or get sent home with nothing but debt. So he agonized over individual notes, over the silences between the notes, and on and on. He needed to put every ounce of himself into getting it just exactly right — because from his perspective his entire life rested in the balance.”

And it shows — Born to Run is an absolutely massive album, and at its core is a frenzied, crawling-out-of-his-skin desperation to leave New Jersey in the dust. The title track is probably the greatest rock song of all time, so it was understandable that in 1980, the New Jersey State Assembly tried to designate it the unofficial anthem of the state’s youth. Members of the press pointed out that maybe it was a bad idea to give that honor to a song that includes lyrics like:

Baby this town rips the bones from your backIt’s a death trap, a suicide wrapWe gotta get out while we’re young’Cause tramps like us, baby we were born to run

The legislation was shelved.

The final song of the album, “Jungleland” remains the single most desperate song I’ve ever heard. It’s two-and-a-half minute sax solo by Bruce’s right hand man, Clarence “The Big Man” Clemons, is a devastating, beautiful wail for attention and recognition. Bruce was so fixated on the solo, knowing it was the great, showstopping finale of his final shot at the big time, that he made Clarence play it for 16 hours straight to get every note perfect.

Of course, we know now that it worked. Bruce made it, and off of the success of Born to Run, he moved out to California, married a movie star, and became the biggest rock star on earth. But his songs — from “Born in the USA” to “The River” — continued to be haunted by the idea of what he might’ve been if he hadn’t made it, if he’d ended up back in Asbury Park like so many of the friends and family he left behind. Bruce ended up leaving his movie star wife for a girl he knew back at the Jersey Shore, and today, he lives just a few miles from where he grew up.

He’s now thoroughly written himself into the DNA of the state — when he performed at the MetLife Stadium in the Meadowlands this summer (my wife and I were in attendance), one of the songs he played was “Wrecking Ball,” which he wrote and first performed at the final show at the old Giants Stadium, which was shortly thereafter destroyed to make way for MetLife. The song, once again, is a haunted commemoration of the people who never quite made it:

When the game has been decidedAnd we're burnin’ down the clockAnd all our little victories and gloriesHave turned into parking lotsWhen your best hopes and desiresAre scattered to the windAnd hard times come and hard times go andHard times come and hard times go andHard times come and hard times goYeah, just to come again

Bring on your wrecking ball

Bruce is, in the long tradition of Great (White Male) American Artists like F. Scott Fitzgerald, Arthur Miller, Hunter S. Thompson, and Kurt Vonnegut, a chronicler of the false promise of the American Dream. There’s an inherent tension to this — Bruce is, after all, a true rags-to-riches Horatio Alger story. But he made good by mining the lives of the people he left behind for material. There are some pockets of New Jersey who resent the fact that the Boss has presumed to speak for them, and who see his success — sometimes at New Jersey’s expense — as hypocritical at best.

I’ve never met Bruce Springsteen, but unbeknownst to him, we have an intense parasocial relationship. Before I left my hometown of Cincinnati, Born to Run was my constant companion. I hated Cincinnati, and was desperate to leave it in the dust. It was this love of Springsteen that first bonded me with the Jersey Girl who became my wife, and — how this happened still perplexes me — somehow, my desperation to leave Cincinnati resulted in my living in Asbury Park, the very place Bruce was so desperate to escape.

I still to this day adore Bruce Springsteen’s music, but since moving to the Jersey Shore, it has been a nagging thought in the back of my head — a thought that I am far from the first New Jerseyan to have — that I am perhaps one of the people he was singing about, the people who shot their shot and missed. And it’s hard to have an entirely positive relationship with someone you suspect would see you that way.

But Bruce is in me whether I like it or not. My wife quoted “Born to Run” in our wedding vows, I got married across the street from the Boardwalk where he played as a busker before making it big, and the dedication he placed into his song “Badlands” — “For the ones who have a notion, a notion deep inside, that it ain’t no sin to be glad you’re alive,” — rings so true to me that it might as well be etched into my heart.

Which is why I’ll scream “BRUUUUUUCE” with the rest of New Jersey in the Meadowlands, for as long as he deigns to keep playing for us.

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