Bruce Springsteen
Rock & roll star, songwriter, author
Born: Sept. 23, 1949, in Long Branch, New Jersey
New Jersey Hall of Fame, Class of 2008: Performing Arts & Entertainment
The Garden State has nurtured many giant talents, but none bigger than Bruce Springsteen. New Jersey’s everyman rose from working-class roots in Monmouth County to become a global superstar while never losing touch with the state and the people that nurtured his creativity.
Springsteen’s career achievements are mammoth. Over six decades starting in 1973, he has released 21 studio albums and chalked up some 140 million recordings sold worldwide. His legendary live performances, mostly with the E Street Band, have grossed multiple billions of dollars. He has earned 20 Grammys, two Golden Globes, an Academy Award, and a special Tony Award. And he has won the undying love of the people of New Jersey for his unwavering commitment to the Garden State.
The son of a bus-driver dad and a housewife mom, Springsteen grew up in Freehold, where he attended St. Rose of Lima Catholic School. In the ninth grade, he switched to public education at Freehold High School, but he already was more interested in music than academics.
After briefly attending Ocean County College and being rejected by the draft broad (due to a concussion suffered in a motorcycle accident), Springsteen turned his full attention to music. His earliest live gigs as a singer/guitarist came with a band called the Castiles. In 1969, he formed Steel Mill, a group that at various times included future E Street Band members Danny Federici, Vini Lopez, and Steven Van Zandt.
Springsteen played with a series of other bands, building up his catalog of original songs, until the legendary talent scout John Hammond signed him to Columbia Records. His debut album, “Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J.,” released in January 1973, was a joyous, poetic celebration of teenage romanticism and youthful drama, with rapid-fire lyrics and ample New Jersey references. Later that year, a second album, “The Wild, the Innocent, & the E Street Shuffle,” arrived with a denser, more R&B-influenced sound. Critics applauded both albums, but neither sold particularly well.
Springsteen and his freshly formed E Street Band toured nationally in support of his early albums, while also performing frequently at New Jersey venues, notably Asbury Park’s Stone Pony, which opened in 1974. His commercial breakout came in 1975 with the release of his third album, the instant classic “Born to Run.” In October 1975, two months after the album’s release, Springsteen was featured simultaneously on the covers of Time and Newsweek magazines. The moment seemed to signal the arrival of a major star. The magazines were right.
True to its title, Springsteen’s fourth album, “Darkness on the Edge of Town,” was a darker collection of songs that went beyond the artist’s earlier New Jersey-inspired work to explore broader themes of hope and despair. “The River,” a double album released in 1980, gave Springsteen his first No. 1 album on the Billboard chart.
Less than a decade into his career, Springsteen had achieved huge success, both on the charts and with his hyper-energetic live performances. Then in 1982, defying common wisdom, he issued “Nebraska,” a stark, stripped-down collection of songs that risked stopping his career trajectory in its tracks. (The episode would later be documented in the 2025 film “Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere.”) Two years later, Springsteen put his career back on track with “Born in the U.S.A.”—a collection of anthemic, concert-ready tracks that became his biggest seller to date.
With a steady stream of live and studio albums and global tours, Springsteen continued to build his audience over the subsequent decades. His varied output ranged from rock albums with the E Street Band and other musicians to folk-inspired solo acoustic collections. As he matured, Springsteen’s lyrics reflected a worldview informed by years on the road, fatherhood, and his own status as cultural icon. He also became a political activist and an outspoken advocate for human rights and other social causes.
In 2017, Springsteen began a residency on Broadway that would run intermittently until 2021. For a total of 236 shows, Springsteen told stories from his 2016 autobiography, and performed his best-loved songs on piano and guitar, accompanied at times by his wife, Patti Scialfa, a longtime member of the E Street Band.
By 2023, Springsteen was back on the road for two more years of shows with the E Street Band. It became their highest-grossing tour ever—and a barometer of Springsteen’s enduring popularity and impact.
In addition to his many industry honors, Springsteen has been awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, presented to him in 2016 by President Barack Obama. In March 2023, President Joe Biden honored Springsteen with the National Medal of the Arts.
Still, few moments could have meant as much to Springsteen as his induction in 2008 in the inaugural class of the New Jersey Hall of Fame. At the induction ceremony, he spoke sincerely (and with ample humor) about his home state and its people—the people who inspired so much of his work. New Jersey, he said, is “a repository of my time on Earth.” And he lauded his fellow New Jerseyans for “the raw hunger, the naked ambition, and the desire not just to do our best, but to stick it in your face.”