Born to Run (Bruce Springsteen song) in Long Branch, New Jersey in early 1974, the song was Bruce Springsteen's final attempt to become successful. The prior year, Springsteen had released two albums to critical acclaim but with little commercial movement. Written in the first person, the song is a love letter to a girl named Wendy, for whom the hot rod-riding protagonist seems to possess the passion to love, just not the patience. However, Springsteen has noted that it has a much simpler core: getting out of Freehold. Route 9 is mentioned from the lyric "sprung from cages out on Highway 9". In his 1996 book
Badlands (Bruce Springsteen song) Badlands (Bruce Springsteen song) "Badlands" is the leadoff track on Bruce Springsteen's fourth studio album "Darkness on the Edge of Town", and its second single. According to Springsteen, he came up with the title "Badlands" before he started writing the song. He felt it was a "great title" but that it would be easy to blow it by not writing a worthy song for it. The riff is based on The Animals' "Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood." According to the editors of "Rolling Stone" magazine, the song "tapped into the ferocity of the punk singles he'd been listening to at