Born to Run

August 28, 2025
by Tom Ewing

Bruce Springsteen’s album, Born to Run, was released fifty years ago this month. The album release was preceded by extensive publicity, including the photographs on covers of both Time and Newsweek, and impressed critics and delighted fans. Although Springsteen is more commonly associated with automobiles (the topic of many songs) and motorcycles (a hobby), Springsteen has meaningful connections with the Bike 76 VA project through album covers, a desire for escape, and the consequences of economic dislocation.

The album cover for the single, Hungry Heart, released in 1980 features Springsteen standing on the Asbury Park, New Jersey boardwalk, while a woman on a ten speed bicycle leans against a phone booth making a call. The woman was not identified on the cover, and in fact Springsteen wrote a note to the photographer asking “who was that girl?” Some years later, Annmarie Solimini Adderley was looking at Springsteen’s boxed album and realized that she was the woman in the photograph. More than thirty years after the photograph was taken, Adderly contacted the photographer to confirm that she was in the photograph, and in turn received a signed copy of the print.

Automobiles and motorcycles are featured in many of Springsteen’s songs, including the title song to the 1975 album, Born to Run. While no lyrics appear to reference bicycles, the underlying themes of the thrill of speed, the desire to escape, and the attraction of seeing the world on the move are often attractions for cyclists as well as automobile Drivers and motorcycle riders. A feature story on Jerry and Carol Mowry of Seminole Florida used the headline, “The Song of the Open Road,” to tell the story of their 4000 mile ride from Oregon to Virginia. While the speed of their ride was certainly slower than the pace envisaged in many Springsteen songs, the attraction of the “open road” was certainly similar, as in this statement from Jerry after completing the trip: “You get on a high. Your senses become sharpened and attuned. You reach out and grab the scenery and savor the flavor of the country you’re passing through.”

Yet the most important connection between Springsteen and the Bikecentennial probably is the issue of economic dislocation in late twentieth century American small towns. As is well known, many of Springsteen’s most popular and enduring songs are about the desire to escape from a hometown. In the 1970s, these songs often identified aspects of post-industrial America, such as the closing of factories or the loss of union jobs, as contributing to these desires to get away. It is somewhat ironic, therefore, that planners of the Bikecentennial selected routes that would bring cyclists into contact with “real America,” because the locations where cyclists encountered people were often small towns experiencing the economic dislocation identified by Springsteen as a factor driving young people away. You can learn more about the underlying causes and long term impact of economic dislocation over the decades from Bike 76 VA podcast episodes on Mineral (9), Irish Creek (16), Troutville (19), Radford (22), and Troutdale (25).