Bruce Springsteen … has been hiding in New Jersey writing these incredible songs…. [He] can be easily dismissed as "justanotherDylanrip-off" if you're not really listening—but increasingly, as he begins a road he knows has done in fellow travellers, he is his own man and points invitingly to the road not taken…. (p. 31)

Bruce Springsteen's songs offer that wonderfully bewildering problem of how to keep up. Words tumble over one another, phrases mysteriously feel right and then disappear…. This was an entirely new perspective offered, like nothing I'd heard before. There was no given, no center I knew all these spokes were connected to. I was once again on my own with new eyes, and it was exhilarating! All of a sudden I remembered the lack! Patterns had developed, formulas into which songs and musicians and songwriters got routinely thrown, and where music had once inspired and been inspired...