The third day of the 30 Day Song Challenge is a song that makes me happy. This was a difficult choice, not least because a great many songs make me happy. But there is one (and really, always has been only one) that can bring me to complete elation, that can make me feel like it was written specifically for me, as though it were telling me personally what to do with my life, and that in the end everything can really only work out for the best. It’s a song full of hope and it’s a song that I can listen to at any time, anywhere, in any mood or state of mind, and it will never---ever---fail to force me to believe that there’s always a way out, always an escape route, always hope just down the road. It can only be The Boss.
The screen door slams. It’s a sound Bruce has heard a thousand times before, a sound that has become so ingrained in his consciousness as a trigger for memories of all the mundanity that goes with his sheltered suburban life. But this time it’s different. This time the almost mythical Mary dances across the porch, a vision of the future in a swaying dress.
These two are kids on the brink of adulthood, searching for their places in life, and they know they won’t find that in New Jersey. Mary’s spent her life hiding beneath her covers and studying her pain, and Bruce has spent his time listening to Roy Orbison singing for the lonely and dreaming of what could be. So he comes for her in the night, not the saviour she’s been praying for, but a chance at least to make it good.
They talk about escape, about the freedom of the open road. He invites her along to find Heaven waiting down on the tracks, to ride out and case the promised land. This song is an invitation to get out of the rut they’ve both found themselves in; it’s a plea to not let themselves become one of the ghosts in burned-out Chevrolets, to go and make something of themselves.
And Bruce makes a convincing point. I can see him standing on Mary’s porch, his arm around her shoulders, his hand outstretched down the highway opening before them, telling her of the fame and fortune they’ll both find if they leave. It’s an argument I think any suburban kid can empathise with. There’s nothing left here, and the world is waiting out there.
That’s precisely why this song can make me happy: because it could be me. It could be any teenager from any suburb, because that’s what we all dream of: escape. And Thunder Road tells us that all we have to do is jump in our cars and hit the road, that there’s something great waiting in that nebulous idea of “out there”, if only we could get our shit together and muster the courage to break out and run.
Now, maybe Thunder Road is just a dream, just a conversation between bored lovers on a porch in the night. Or maybe it’s something bigger. Maybe it’s more than a dream. Maybe it’s faith. Maybe, just maybe, it’s a prayer. An entreaty to believe that no matter how desperate your situation, it’s always up to you to do something. It’s a prayer to the self, to getting up and taking action. There’s no point in sitting around waiting to get old, it says. You need to move. You need to keep moving, or else it’s all over.
Maybe you won’t make it. Maybe you’ll fail. Maybe there’s nothing waiting down the road for you, but you have to try. Thunder Road, like All Along the Watchtower, ends with a cliffhanger. We don’t know if they made it wherever they went. We don’t know what happens to them in the end, but that’s not the point. Mary and Bruce jump in his car and pull out of that town full of losers, and it’s the best thing they ever did. The song ends in triumph. Sheer, unadulterated triumph. It’s not where they’re going that matters: it’s where they left.
The song itself is a journey: a journey to a decision. That inauspicious piano riff in the beginning suggests that everything’s alright, that they’re comfortable with dancing on the porch. But then they start to dream, and dreaming can be dangerous. Not dangerous to Mary and Bruce, but dangerous to their way of life, dangerous to their boredom and ennui, but by the end of the song you realise that you should never be afraid to dream, that sometimes your dreams are the only things that can save you, and it’s only when you follow them that it really makes a difference.
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