July 8: Spirit in the Night -- Bruce Springsteen

Recently, the NPR Music podcast featured listener suggestions about great summer songs. Weezer's "Islands in the Sun" ended the podcast, but other gems showed up such as Dylan's 1965 hit "Like a Rolling Stone" and the classically psychedelic "Maggot Brain" by Funkadelic (even if you don't listen to the whole song, at the very least take a close listen to the intro). This got one GSD Staffer thinking about his favorite summer song.

Bruce Springsteen's "Spirit in the Night" is a summer song for the ages. Perhaps it doesn't promote the best values (drinking, drugging, the late-night-all-right, general recklessness), but the carefree spirit of the song--summer's wonderful potential and its dangerouse pitfalls--is what summer is all about. The song tells the story of six friends who road-trip out to a favorite summer stomping ground and let the night take its own unpredictable course. Some get lucky, some get hurt, but it's one of those nights that these friends will talk about well into their adult lives. Springsteen is at his best telling these kinds of middle American narratives through his own hip vernacular ("Janey's fingers were in my cake..."; "We danced all night to a soul fairy band..."), and Clarence Clemons's signature sax sets the soulfully funky theme of the song.

Other summer songs capture the spirit of the free-and-easy living of summer--Katy Perry's "California Gurls" and "Summer Lover" by Justin Timberlake come to mind--but few singers have Springsteen's ability to capture a spirit and bring the characters in his narrative to life so clearly. The outcomes of some of the characters in the song have prevented "Spirit of the Night" from becoming a true summertime anthem, but the mixture of freedom and danger he shows us in the song defines the allure of summer.