On Thunder Road, Lost Dreams and Broken Promises
The first time I heard Thunder Road I was seventeen.
Following the more or less casual listening of four Springsteen songs during the previous couple of months, and having quite accidentally stumbled across it for the ridiculous price of € 4,99 while on a shopping mission with my dad, I decided to buy the Greatest Hits just to see if what seemed to be a little bunch of musically good songs would turn out to have equally good lyrics as well. It was the early summer of 2006, school had finished just the week before, and I found myself to be without assignments for the next predictable three months. Then as now, I didn't have what you would call a social life, so I was still tagging along with my parents whenever boredom hit me home (or when they simply forced me to get out with them), and even if I didn't know it then, I was happy. Yes, I considered myself ugly. Yes, I had just one or maybe two friend I occasionally hanged out with. And yes, if you had asked me then, I would have told you that my life sucked, or at least that it wasn't nothing exceptional. Boy, was I wrong.
But apart from my usual despise for myself, at that point of my life I was still stable. Just the predictable, occasional breakdowns that accompany every teenager's life.
So anyway, I went back home, and upstairs, straight to my bedroom, just not to waste those precious minutes before lunch was ready. I still had a quite ancient cd player by then, blue and round, that was already starting to lose some beats now and then and definitely would not read unoriginal discs. I unwrapped the Greatest Hits, frantically pushed the cd compartment opened and inserted the disc in. It worked just after three tries, and I was running out of time. I sat back on my rolling black chair, sighed of relief, and while the first piano notes started unfolding, I carefully slipped the insert containing the lyrics and started to read them, trying and make some sense out of them. In 2006 I was almost an absolute wreck at English: I didn't like it and it didn't like me. But still, lyrics were always fundamental to me, and I felt I would miss out on something if I didn't even make an effort to understand what the hell were they about.
Goes without saying, that first reading wasn't successful, and even before the song wrapped up, I heard my mum's voice yelling at me to get down for lunch. Some of the greatest love stories have such undignified beginnings.
I did not give up however, and for the next ten days or so I strenuously worked on getting a better translation out of those lyrics, eventually succeeding in at least rendering a vague sense of their magnificence, as I found out half a year later upon discovering an Italian fansite with the lyrics translated in Italian in a much better version than mine. Those were also the days when internet was still seen as a privilege - in Southern Italy at least - and therefore limited in usage and time (spoiler alert: summer was not the right one), so I didn't really have an alternative at waiting. That summer, along with devouring my usual ridiculous amount of books of various nature and keeping on writing my soon-to-get-partially-lost novel, I dedicated myself to the hobby of translating the lyrics of all the songs from that Greatest Hits. If we could consider books as friends, that summer I made one named Italian-English/English-Italian dictionary. My life had never been funnier.
But the lyrics weren't the only thing I didn't get right the first time around. As said, I was in a hurry, so I didn't really get the song either. Of course I liked it. Of course I smiled as the piano parts came along. But that was about it. Truth be told, when my mum called out for me I waited just few seconds before turning it off, thus not even getting to the end of Clarence's solo. Ah, the blasphemy!
Thunder Road is Thunder Road though, and if it wasn't, maybe I would not be here now writing this kind of memoir. Because Thunder Road is not just a rock 'n' roll song - even if a terrific one at that - Thunder Road is much, much more. It cannot leave you untouched, no matter how distracted or absent-minded you were that first time around. It just can't. Sooner or later, It drags you back in with all the strength and energy It has, and does not let you go until you are its. Rebelling against your fate is useless, and thank god for that. So, a couple of days later there I was, listening to it again. And again. And again. My main memory from summer 2006 is basically sitting on the bed in my countryside room, door closed, air-con on, Greatest Hits blasting through my old cd player. The best times it was on Saturday nights, around 3 or 4 am, after we had got back home from an evening out at my parent's social club. In the wee-wee hours, after everyone had gone to sleep, I would lie in bed awake, under its light sheet, the music as low as possible, and would stay there until I'd listen to it start to bottom, my mind full of roads disappearing in a tiny white point at the horizon and a sense of freedom and aliveness that it's easily found when you're seventeen (I would give anything to feel it now, even for just one time). By December of that same year, after my definitive consecration via a out-of-mind, impossible concert in Caserta and the subsequential change of my life towards a more crazy and unpredictable direction, Thunder Road became one of my favorite Springsteen songs. By April 2007, it was my favorite song of all times. Legally an adult, my mind had already decided I wasn't cut to be one. Not then, not ever. The summer after I heard it for the very first time, this song had entered so deeply and so incisively into me that I just wasn't able to detach myself from it anymore. It had become entirely part of me.
Nine years and way too much shit later, Thunder Road is still here, keeping me company whenever I need it to. Of that girl full of hopes and dreams who used to try and figure all those mysterious words out during a hot, long summer when everything seemed possible and the world was out there to conquer very little has survived. It's the price of growing up. Even if your whole self rebels against it there's nothing you can do to stop it from happening. That is, unless you don't want to just give up the possibility to win altogether, and I never was one of those people. I gave a try to the game, and lost. So during the years Thunder Road has slowly become my drinking buddy, or I'd better say, the shoulder upon which I'd cry and cry, over and over again. Whenever the last straw of a long run hits and I just feel too crushed against the ground to stand up once more, I go hide 'neath my covers and study my pain, put earphones on, select Thunder Road on my iPod and close my eyes. And halfway through, every fucking single time, I start weep, thinking about the seventeen-years-old me and those easier, carefree times; long, deserted and infinite highways and old cars to ride them in; the feeling everything is possible to achieve and the awareness of having the power to make it happen.
The first time I heard Thunder Road I was seventeen, and I was sure the world was gonna be mine.
At twenty-five, I hold Thunder Road in my heart and a bunch of lost dreams and broken promises into my scarred hands.
Following the more or less casual listening of four Springsteen songs during the previous couple of months, and having quite accidentally stumbled across it for the ridiculous price of € 4,99 while on a shopping mission with my dad, I decided to buy the Greatest Hits just to see if what seemed to be a little bunch of musically good songs would turn out to have equally good lyrics as well. It was the early summer of 2006, school had finished just the week before, and I found myself to be without assignments for the next predictable three months. Then as now, I didn't have what you would call a social life, so I was still tagging along with my parents whenever boredom hit me home (or when they simply forced me to get out with them), and even if I didn't know it then, I was happy. Yes, I considered myself ugly. Yes, I had just one or maybe two friend I occasionally hanged out with. And yes, if you had asked me then, I would have told you that my life sucked, or at least that it wasn't nothing exceptional. Boy, was I wrong.
But apart from my usual despise for myself, at that point of my life I was still stable. Just the predictable, occasional breakdowns that accompany every teenager's life.
So anyway, I went back home, and upstairs, straight to my bedroom, just not to waste those precious minutes before lunch was ready. I still had a quite ancient cd player by then, blue and round, that was already starting to lose some beats now and then and definitely would not read unoriginal discs. I unwrapped the Greatest Hits, frantically pushed the cd compartment opened and inserted the disc in. It worked just after three tries, and I was running out of time. I sat back on my rolling black chair, sighed of relief, and while the first piano notes started unfolding, I carefully slipped the insert containing the lyrics and started to read them, trying and make some sense out of them. In 2006 I was almost an absolute wreck at English: I didn't like it and it didn't like me. But still, lyrics were always fundamental to me, and I felt I would miss out on something if I didn't even make an effort to understand what the hell were they about.
Goes without saying, that first reading wasn't successful, and even before the song wrapped up, I heard my mum's voice yelling at me to get down for lunch. Some of the greatest love stories have such undignified beginnings.
I did not give up however, and for the next ten days or so I strenuously worked on getting a better translation out of those lyrics, eventually succeeding in at least rendering a vague sense of their magnificence, as I found out half a year later upon discovering an Italian fansite with the lyrics translated in Italian in a much better version than mine. Those were also the days when internet was still seen as a privilege - in Southern Italy at least - and therefore limited in usage and time (spoiler alert: summer was not the right one), so I didn't really have an alternative at waiting. That summer, along with devouring my usual ridiculous amount of books of various nature and keeping on writing my soon-to-get-partially-lost novel, I dedicated myself to the hobby of translating the lyrics of all the songs from that Greatest Hits. If we could consider books as friends, that summer I made one named Italian-English/English-Italian dictionary. My life had never been funnier.
But the lyrics weren't the only thing I didn't get right the first time around. As said, I was in a hurry, so I didn't really get the song either. Of course I liked it. Of course I smiled as the piano parts came along. But that was about it. Truth be told, when my mum called out for me I waited just few seconds before turning it off, thus not even getting to the end of Clarence's solo. Ah, the blasphemy!
Thunder Road is Thunder Road though, and if it wasn't, maybe I would not be here now writing this kind of memoir. Because Thunder Road is not just a rock 'n' roll song - even if a terrific one at that - Thunder Road is much, much more. It cannot leave you untouched, no matter how distracted or absent-minded you were that first time around. It just can't. Sooner or later, It drags you back in with all the strength and energy It has, and does not let you go until you are its. Rebelling against your fate is useless, and thank god for that. So, a couple of days later there I was, listening to it again. And again. And again. My main memory from summer 2006 is basically sitting on the bed in my countryside room, door closed, air-con on, Greatest Hits blasting through my old cd player. The best times it was on Saturday nights, around 3 or 4 am, after we had got back home from an evening out at my parent's social club. In the wee-wee hours, after everyone had gone to sleep, I would lie in bed awake, under its light sheet, the music as low as possible, and would stay there until I'd listen to it start to bottom, my mind full of roads disappearing in a tiny white point at the horizon and a sense of freedom and aliveness that it's easily found when you're seventeen (I would give anything to feel it now, even for just one time). By December of that same year, after my definitive consecration via a out-of-mind, impossible concert in Caserta and the subsequential change of my life towards a more crazy and unpredictable direction, Thunder Road became one of my favorite Springsteen songs. By April 2007, it was my favorite song of all times. Legally an adult, my mind had already decided I wasn't cut to be one. Not then, not ever. The summer after I heard it for the very first time, this song had entered so deeply and so incisively into me that I just wasn't able to detach myself from it anymore. It had become entirely part of me.
Nine years and way too much shit later, Thunder Road is still here, keeping me company whenever I need it to. Of that girl full of hopes and dreams who used to try and figure all those mysterious words out during a hot, long summer when everything seemed possible and the world was out there to conquer very little has survived. It's the price of growing up. Even if your whole self rebels against it there's nothing you can do to stop it from happening. That is, unless you don't want to just give up the possibility to win altogether, and I never was one of those people. I gave a try to the game, and lost. So during the years Thunder Road has slowly become my drinking buddy, or I'd better say, the shoulder upon which I'd cry and cry, over and over again. Whenever the last straw of a long run hits and I just feel too crushed against the ground to stand up once more, I go hide 'neath my covers and study my pain, put earphones on, select Thunder Road on my iPod and close my eyes. And halfway through, every fucking single time, I start weep, thinking about the seventeen-years-old me and those easier, carefree times; long, deserted and infinite highways and old cars to ride them in; the feeling everything is possible to achieve and the awareness of having the power to make it happen.
The first time I heard Thunder Road I was seventeen, and I was sure the world was gonna be mine.
At twenty-five, I hold Thunder Road in my heart and a bunch of lost dreams and broken promises into my scarred hands.