Judge said, what you got in your defense son? Fifty-seven channels and nothing on.

I tend to be pessimistic. I want to believe in hope.

The different social forces that affected my parents' lives or my friends' lives or I saw around me became essential for me to write about.

I had a ten-piece band when I was 21 years old, the Bruce Springsteen Band. This is just a slightly expanded version of a band I had before I ever signed a record contract. We had singers and horns.

If you're up there [on stage] thinking about what you're doing, you're just not there and it's not going to happen.So trying to learn how to overcome those - which is a normal thing to do. You're in front of a lot of people. People are going to get very self-conscious. So you have to learn to sort of overcome that tendency towards self-consciousness and just blow it wide open. And you jump in and join all those people that are out there enjoying what you're doing together.

When I first started in rock, I had a big guy's audience for my early records. I had a very straight image, particularly through the mid '80s.

Badlands, you got to live it everyday, let the broken hearts stand as the price you've got to pay.