In the liner notes to his Greatest Hits Springsteen presented Born to Run as "My shot at the title. A 24 yr. old kid aimin' at 'the greatest rock'nroll record ever'.". This is eloquently put because Springsteen manages to give a true account of his level of ambition back in 1975, and yet does it with a tinge of irony suitable for a 20 years older man. But actually, he didn't have to be ironical at all. Despite his many great albums the majority of fans and critics will agree, that Born to Run stands out as his finest. And whenever some magazine sets up a list of the leading albums in the history of rock it is by Born to Run that you should expect to see Springsteen represented in the top 30. Well, in my humble opinion the 24 year old kid simply turned out to hit exactly what he was aiming at: the greatest rock'nroll album ever.
The sublime quality of Born to Run evolves from a lot of factors. The compositions are complex, thoroughly worked out and relatively long, lasting up to 6½ and 9½ minutes. And the album taken as a whole is blessed with a peculiar consistency, which makes all the songs fit into their respective places like different strokes on a painting. Furthermore, each and every song is great, and yet they are so varied that they will open themselves to the listener at different phases in the process of reception. Most listeners will pretty quickly give in to the power of Springsteen's youthful manifesto on Thunder Road and the title track, which are both true masterpieces. But so are Backstreets and Jungleland though they may need a little more time to sink in. And then there are songs which may appear strange at the first listenings but can someday, maybe years later, invade your mind. These could be Night which is often underrated, Tenth Avenue Freeze-out which underwent the rare destiny of actually getting better in the live-version from 1986 - and especially Meeting across the River which I personally hated for years but ended up loving (it is so slow, jazzy and sad that it may seem incompatible with the overall message of the album - but if it was just a filler there wouldn't recently have been published a whole book of stories inspired by that one song!).
The deeper reason for the greatness of Born to Run lies in the balance it keeps between different tendencies working in the art of Bruce Springsteen and dominating at different stages of his development. In a way, it's a transitory album. Springsteen was changing manager at the time and some very important changes were made to the E Street Band: The jazzy piano player David Sancious and the capricious, Keith-Moon-inspired drummer Vini Lopez were replaced by Roy Bittan and Max Weinberg, both very reliable classical rock musicians. Furthermore, Springsteen was in the process of leaving adolescence behind. He seems to have been an extraordinary untroubled and lighthearted youngster, enjoying life with an almost vegetative carefreeness. But after two albums without any great breakthrough he now had to put up a struggle for his future as a musician and other experiences (i.e. women!) may have contributed even more profoundly to a new sense of seriousness and decision. The musical and the spiritual aspect of this development seem clearly interwoven and the common denominator is self-control. As an archetypical romantic Springsteen initially tended towards anarchy but once engaged in a struggle with the realities and trying to maintain himself through that struggle he would have to give up spontaneity for structure, playfulness for order, anarchy for form.
This is actually the formula for Springsteen's artistic development right up to the beginning of the nineties (when something turned him into a "storyteller", a concept profoundly opposed to the true meaning of his best work). Springsteens first records expressed a magical hippie world view that contrasts pretty sharply against the working class realism for which he became an icon in the eighties. And as the lyrics became progressively more burdened by "the real world" - and the struggle to survive in it - so the music became progressively simpler, rougher, less excessively poetic and more suitable for everyday use. You can wrangle a lot about the final value of what was lost and won during this process. To a large extent the answer will depend on your general outlook and this has been the ideological background for many an argument about whether Born to Run (1975) or Darkness on the Edge of Town (1978) is Springsteen's best album. In the end, most people will admit that Darkness on the Edge of Town may be his other masterpiece but that the compositions on Born to Run have a grandeur that makes them uncomparable to anything else. It seems like the blend of romanticism / musical complexity and realism / musical order reached some kind of sublime balance on this particular record.