2025 was the year of the Bruce Springsteen biopic Deliver Me from Nowhere, but it was also the 50th anniversary of Springsteen’s first great album: Born to Run. While Deliver Me from Nowhere, based on the book by Warren Zanes, was about the making of Springsteen’s stark acoustic album Nebraska, Peter Ames Carlin’s Tonight in Jungleland: The Making of Born to Run takes us into the creation of that “wall of sound” masterpiece.
Springsteen’s first two albums — Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J. and The Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle — were mostly recorded live: “Set up the mics to capture the sound as clearly as possible, count off the song, and then let ‘er rip.” But Born to Run is when Jon Landau wrested control of the producer’s chair from Mike Appel, and Landau had a decidedly different approach when it came to making records, arguing that “the technical verities of the recording studio create a necessary paradox: capturing the parts separately sounded more alive and powerful than a full-band-in-the-studio recording ever could.” The result was an album that rightly finds its place at or near the top of just about any Greatest Albums of All Time list.
Carlin, an experienced music journalist and author of the biography Bruce, is pals with Springsteen and Landau, so he has the scoop on what happened during those momentous moments in the studio — at least as they are now remembered by the principals, including the album’s studio engineers and all the members of the E Street Band. He puts that inside information to good use. There is granular detail about everything from the songs’s origins to the tension between Landau and Appel to photographer Eric Meola’s cover shoot, to how open Springsteen was to trying out every possible sound combination in every song: “A string section. An ascending guitar riff repeated through the verse. A chorus of women chiming in on the chorus. An even bigger chorus of women ooh-ing behind the third verse.” And on, and on, with the studio costs always rising, and the album’s release date getting ever nearer.