Thunder Road

Springsteen wrote the song at his living-room piano in Long Branch. In October 1974 it existed as a solo recording called Chrissie's Song, which already had the line about leaving what you have lost on Thunder Road. By early 1975 he had joined it with lyrics from another piece, Walking in the Street, and played it as Wings for Wheels at a benefit for the Main Point on 5 February 1975. It was then renamed Thunder Road. He said in 1978 that the name came from a poster for the 1958 Robert Mitchum film, which he had not seen.

Jon Landau joined the production on 13 April 1975 and moved sessions to the Record Plant, where Jimmy Iovine replaced Louis Lahav as engineer. Work took three days, 18, 19 and 23 April, with final overdubs and mixing on 15 and 16 July. Bittan's piano and Springsteen's harmonica open the song, and Clemons and Bittan, on tenor saxophone and Fender Rhodes, play the coda. The lyrics describe a young woman named Mary and her boyfriend and their one last chance to make it real. Max Weinberg talked him out of an early line about skeletons in shallow graves in favor of burned-out Chevrolets. In 2021 Landau said the printed line Mary's dress waves was a typo for sways.

Reception and live

Rolling Stone ranks it number 111 on its list of the 500 greatest songs, and the station WXPN put it first on a 2004 list of 885 songs. Nick Hornby wrote about it in 31 Songs. The electric version from the 1992 In Concert/MTV Plugged special was nominated for a Grammy for Best Male Rock Vocal Performance. Springsteen dedicated it to Tim Russert at Millennium Stadium, Cardiff, on 14 June 2008, and sang it at a Hillary Clinton rally in Philadelphia on 7 November 2016. He later wrote a sequel, The Promise, which came out on 18 Tracks in 1999 and on The Promise in 2010. Eric Church, Melissa Etheridge, Cowboy Junkies, Badly Drawn Boy, Frank Turner and Tori Amos have covered the song.