Springsteen discusses autobiography, announces details of MetLife concert CDs

DANNY CLINCH

BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN

The Springsteen news never stops: Two days after concluding his record-setting stand at MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford, there are two small items his fans may want to be aware of.

First, he has announced that music from all three MetLife Stadium shows will be released together, both digitally and in CD form. The anticipated date for downloads to be available is Sept. 12, while CDs will be shipped after Oct. 1. For details, visit live.brucespringsteen.net.

Also, he has released a video discussing his upcoming autobiography, “Born to Run” (scheduled to be released Sept. 27). In it he compares the book writing process to the songwriting process.

You can watch the video below, but here is a transcript of what he says:

It started in 2009. After we played the Super Bowl, I wrote that little essay for my web site. It felt like I found a good voice to write in, with it. I said, ‘Well, maybe I’ll try to write a little bit more in that voice, and see where it takes me.” And I didn’t have any idea of whether it was going to be a book, or something else, or maybe just something for the kids. So I just started … went back to what I felt was the beginning and slowly started to write, you know. And I think after two or three weeks, I had a little bit of something that I could look at and say, “Hmm, that feels pretty workable.” And then after that, I wrote intermittently for seven years, you know. And there was no rush. Mainly I was just trying to write as well as I could, and having all that time to do it kind of gave me a chance to come back to it fresh. Even from my original manuscript, everything was rewritten two or three times — very similar to the songwriting process in that you write down your first thoughts, which is your blueprint, and you see if you have something that can be worked on. And then I’ll go back and I’ll get into each verse, and I’ll rewrite it. And so the book was very similar to that. There were sections that kind of just came flying out. The hardest part was … where you had to write about the present, ’cause it’s all people you’re living with, in your life today. That was the most challenging part of the book, I found. Writing about stuff that was in the past, you just felt like you had a lot of freedom there, you know. Once again, you had to find the right the voice to write about it in.