Bruce Springsteen Admits He Was Unhappy With His Most Iconic Album

As Bruce Springsteen gets ready to release a seven-album compilation of music from 1983 to 2018, he’s reflecting on his musical career. His seventh album, in particular.

Many singers and bands have admitted to not liking their most popular songs or albums. For Miley Cyrus, it was a song that helped launch her post-“Hannah Montana” music career: “Party in the U.S.A.”

“Honestly, I picked that song because I needed something to go with my clothing line,” she admitted in an interview with MileyWorld.com (via Us Weekly). “I didn’t write it and … I didn’t expect it to be popular, originally. It was just something that I wanted to do, and I needed some songs and it turned out for the best.”

Bruce Springsteen can relate. In a recent interview, the iconic singer admitted that he was unhappy with his popular, Grammy-winning album, “Born in the U.S.A.”

Bruce Springsteen Claims the Album Was Going to Be Darker

“Born In the U.S.A. changed my life,” Springsteen wrote in his 2016 autobiography, “Born To Run.” It “gave me my biggest audience, forced me to think more about the way I presented my music and briefly put me at the center of the pop world.”

“Born in the U.S.A.” became a force of nature. But Springsteen said that he’d planned to make a darker album to follow up his 1982 folk album, “Nebraska.” Instead, he ended up with the pop-music friendly “Born In the U.S.A.”

“From conception to execution, it was not necessarily the record that in my mind I had planned on, but that’s the way creativity works,” he told Rolling Stone. “You go in the studio, you have an idea. It’s not necessarily what you come out with. So that was just the situation of that record for me personally.”

He Reveals the Songs Were ‘Just What I Had at the Time’

Springsteen had made another album in between “Nebraska” and “Born In the U.S.A.” Therefore, selecting songs for the latter proved challenging.

“At the time, I wasn’t sure where I was going with “Born in the U.S.A,” he said. “I had half the record, but I didn’t have the other half. And so it was just a record that happened in between those two records.”

“It was a record I put out. It became the record I made, not necessarily the record that I was interested in making. I was interested in taking “Nebraska” and making a full record that had somewhat that same feeling,” the “Secret Garden” singer explained.

“If you hear “My Hometown” and you hear “Born in the U.S.A.,” they were sort of the bookends I intended,” he acknowledged. “And the rest of the stuff was … just what I had at the time. Those were the songs I wrote. Those were the songs I recorded.”