For all his accolades, fortune and millions of fans, Bruce Springsteen has been in therapy for 30 years, he has revealed in the New Yorker. “You cannot underestimate the fine power of self-loathing in all of this,” he told editor David Remnick.
Springsteen’s comments come as the 62-year-old sprints around the world, performing three-hour gig after three-hour gig on a blockbuster tour. These performances require extraordinary mental and physical fortitude, and Springsteen’s health is mostly based on a simple regimen: “He eats right and he’s in the gym,” bandmate Steve van Zandt told Rolling Stone. “[And] he’s in good shape by not doing drugs.” Springsteen has never done drugs, Van Zandt claims. “Don’t drink, eat right, go to the gym and you can rock’n’roll at 62, too.”
Despite this healthy lifestyle, Springsteen has his demons. While he was working on his 1982 album Nebraska, he felt “suicidal”, according to friend and biographer Dave Marsh. “The depression wasn’t shocking, per se,” Marsh explained to Remnick. “He was on a rocket ride, from nothing to something, and now you are getting your ass kissed day and night. You might start to have some inner conflicts about your real self-worth.”
“My issues weren’t as obvious as drugs,” Springsteen explained to Remnick. “They were quieter – just as problematic, but quieter. With all artists, because of the undertow of history and self-loathing, there is a tremendous push toward self-obliteration that occurs onstage … You are free of yourself for those hours; all the voices in your head are gone. Just gone. There’s no room for them. There’s one voice, the voice you’re speaking in.”
The Boss was driven, he admitted, “by pure fear and self-loathing and self-hatred”.
“I’m 30 years in analysis!” Springsteen said. “You think, I don’t like anything I’m seeing, I don’t like anything I’m doing, but I need to change myself, I need to transform myself.
“I do not know a single artist who does not run on that fuel,” he continued. “If you are extremely pleased with yourself, nobody would be fucking doing it! Brando would not have acted. Dylan wouldn’t have written Like a Rolling Stone. James Brown wouldn’t have gone ‘Unh!’ He wouldn’t have searched that one-beat down that was so hard. That’s a motivation, that element of ‘I need to remake myself, my town, my audience’ – the desire for renewal.”
