8 tracks
Side one "Thunder Road" "Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out" "Night" "Backstreets" Side two "Born to Run" "She's the One" "Meeting Across the River" "Jungleland"

8 tracks
Side one "Thunder Road" "Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out" "Night" "Backstreets" Side two "Born to Run" "She's the One" "Meeting Across the River" "Jungleland"

"Thunder Road" was written and performed by Bruce Springsteen, and is the opening track on his 1975 breakthrough album Born to Run. It is ranked as one of Springsteen's greatest songs, and often appears on lists of the top rock songs of all time.Rolling Stone magazine placed it as #86 on its "500 Greatest Songs of All Time."

The song underwent considerable evolution as it was written, with an early version titled "Wings for Wheels" first performed at The Main Point in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, on February 5, 1975. The phrase "wings for wheels" would eventually be used in the final version of the song's lyrics. Other early versions also mention a girl named Angelina or Christina rather than the studio version's Mary. Among other changes, including entirely different lyrics for some verses, the original version of "Wings for Wheels" concluded with "This is a town full of losers, and baby I was born to win," instead of the studio version's ending, "It's a town full of losers, and I'm pulling out of here to win."

During Springsteen's writing of the lyrics to "Thunder Road", instead of "Skeleton frames of burned out Chevrolets", he had written, “Skeletons found by exhumed shallow graves”. Max Weinberg convinced Springsteen to move away from the darker lyrics and stay consistent with the blue collar spirit of the album.

The lyric to "Thunder Road" describes a young woman named Mary, her boyfriend, and their "one last chance to make it real."

Musically, the song opens with a quiet piano (Roy Bittan) and harmonica (Springsteen) introduction, meant, as Springsteen said years later in the Wings For Wheels documentary, as a "welcoming" to both the track and the album, a signifier that something was about to happen. Eschewing a traditional verse-and-chorus structure, the song's arrangement gradually ramps up in instrumentation, tempo and intensity. The title phrase is not used until the middle section of the song, where it is recited three times in one line, and twice more in another, and is not used again. Finally, after the closing line there is a tenor saxophone and Fender Rhodes duet played by Clarence Clemons and Bittan respectively in the instrumental coda.

In this song, Springsteen mentions Roy Orbison "singing for the lonely" on the radio. Orbison, one of whose best-known songs is "Only the Lonely", was a huge influence on Springsteen.

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Wikipedia