Bruce Springsteen: Like a Killer in the Sun (Selected Lyrics, 1972-2017)
by Leonardo Colombati
(Backbeat Books, £26)

WEIGHING in at a mighty 600 pages this is an unorthodox biography of Bruce Springsteen, related through song lyrics, critical commentaries, timelines, catalogues and lists.

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The author’s central idea is that Springsteen’s lyrical oeuvre is an epic novel in fragmented form. The book’s opening segment, The Great American Novel, situates his work in US cultural history and it covers the influence of black music, the beginnings of rock and roll, the portrayal of masculinity in cinema, notable novelists, influential poets, urban decay and the demands of life in the post-industrial US.  

There's also an extensive assessment of Springsteen’s artistic development and the cultural and personal obsessions that have informed it, with the author explaining that Springsteen’s explorations of the dark side of the US dream on albums such as Nebraska, Born in the USA and The Ghost of Tom Joad draw on classic literature and cinema as well as contemporary politics and news stories.

Springsteen, he argues, has created a new US mythology celebrating emotional survival, dreams of transcendence and the transformational possibilities of poetry and music.  

The core of the book presents the lyrics of 91 songs from 1972 to 2017, organised according to themes of the artist’s youthful quest for escape, the gap between US dreams and realities and personal experiences.   

In the final segment, Colombati analyses the sources, influences and meanings of each song. It’s easy to dismiss Springsteen as a multimillionaire stadium rocker, but Killer in the Sun uncovers a secret history of his life and work.

Many writers have identified a radical edge to Springsteen’s music, but Colombati makes an interesting attribution. It wasn’t the inspiration of a radical worldview that led the young Springsteen to pick up a guitar but his love of African-American music, early rock and roll and protest songs that guided him towards a left-liberal outlook.  This assertion could have seemed trite and untestable, but the weight of supporting research makes it totally persuasive.  

The book closes with a series of appendices — a biographical timeline, a catalogue of work and lists of live performances — that will delight Springsteen obsessives.  

For the rest of us, this comprehensive, balanced and scholarly book offers genuinely fresh insights into a fallible but fascinating musician.  Like Roger Waters, Springsteen is an artist of complexities and contradictions, a man with a relish for rock-star trappings but who exhibits consistent concern for exploited and dispossessed people in the US and elsewhere.

Springsteen aficionados will argue about the relative merits of the lyrics Colombati has selected.  I was delighted to find several of my favourites on the contents page, including the elegiac Atlantic City. “Now I been lookin' for a job, but it’s hard to find, down here it’s just winners and losers and don’t get caught on the wrong side of that line…”