LOS ANGELES, Sept. 7 (UPI) — Bruce Springsteen opened up about his battle with depression in his upcoming memoir, “Born to Run: Chapter and Verse,” saying the disease is something that “never leaves you.”
In an interview with Vanity Fair, Springsteen spoke freely about his tumultuous relationship with his father and the inherited mental illness that runs through that side of his family.
“As a child,” Springsteen wrote about growing up with his relatives, “it was simply mysterious, embarrassing, and ordinary.”
His relationship with his father was conflicted, having described the song “Independence Day” to one crowd as a song about “two people who love each other but struggle to understand one another.”
Springsteen described his father as “a bit of a Bukowski character,” easily angered, isolated, a drinker, and often cruel.
Springsteen acknowledges the important role therapy has played in his life and, in his book, notes that he still struggles.
“One of the points I’m making in the book is that, whoever you’ve been and wherever you’ve been, it never leaves you,” he said. “I always picture it as a car. All your selves are in it. And a new self can get in, but the old selves can’t ever get out. The important thing is, who’s got their hands on the wheel at an given moment.”
Springsteen said that, for him, touring is the “truest form of self-medication.”
“Playing a show brings a tremendous amount of euphoria,” he said. “The danger of it is, there’s always that moment, comes every night, where you think, Hey, man, I’m gonna live forever! You’re feeling all your power. And then you come offstage, and the main thing you realize is ‘Well, that’s over.’ Mortality sets back in.”
On Aug. 25, Springsteen broke his own record for the longest show played in the United States with a four hour, 33 song performance in East Rutherford, N.J.
“Born to Run” hits bookshelves Sept. 27.
