Born to Run turns fifty and is ranked track-by-track in celebration of its anniversary. The album's arduous making is framed as a last-ditch effort by Bruce Springsteen to achieve superstar status and as a commentary on the decline of the American dream. Notable lore includes multiple guitar overdubs on the title track and the refrain 'lyrics by Dylan, sung by Orbison, and produced by Spector.' Those production stories and surrounding myths are acknowledged as true but treated as lore. The ranking prioritizes personal nostalgia and youthful memory over technical minutiae. Several childhood recollections describe hearing the record on road trips and at home.
While these chronicles are more than worthy in their own right, I'm also not interested in how many guitar overdubs were recorded for the title track, or regurgitating the "lyrics by Dylan, sung by Orbison, and produced by Spector" line (although I guess I just did). Both of these bits of lore - and many other stories surrounding the album - are true, but that's just what they are this late in the game: lore.
So for this installment of Ranking the Album, I'd like to put the grown-up critic in me to sleep and let my inner nine-year-old stay up past his bedtime. That's the age when I first heard Born to Run during a road trip or two to Cocoa Beach, Florida, on my dad's stereo while he was lifting weights, and just playing around the house whenever my family was cleaning, eating, or doing nothing at all.
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