GP's Song of the Day: Bruce Springsteen

Once released, it catapulted Springsteen towards world domination and though it has been played at just about every Bruce gig ever since, it still sounds fresh as a daisy.

It's hard to beat the adrenalin rush of the song's intro or the lyricism of the last verse: "Together Wendy w'ell live with the sadness/I'll love you with all the madness in my soul/Someday girl I don't know when were gonna get to that place/Where we really want to go and we'll walk in the sun/But till then tramps like us baby we were born to run."

It's a song about getting away from small towns but also about love and finding yourself and, oh yeah, it makes you want to play air guitar like no other song ever recorded.

Decent Springsteen fact Number 1: At a Springsteen concert last year, Barack Obama confessed to his wife that he was only running for president because he couldn't be Bruce. (I don't want to accuse Obama of copying me or anything, but I did write a column five years ago which started with the words "In what has been one of the biggest blows of my life so far, I have finally admitted that I will never be Bruce Springsteen.")

Decent Springsteen fact Number 2: In an episode of the Sopranos where Christopher turns up late for a meeting with Tony and Silvio - played by E Street Band guitarist Steven van Zandt - his excuse is that the "highway's jammed with broken heroes on a last chance power drive" - a line from Born to Run.

(Check out this acoustic version from a tour in the late 1980s which is also, as it happens, fairly wonderful...)