Word Choice

Cover of Born to Run

It is my firm belief that, if Bruce Springsteen's classics Born to Run and Thunder Road were consecutive events, the former would have happened way before the latter. This conclusion came about after much study of the pieces (blasting them through the speakers of a red pickup at midnight driving through country roads), and, in particular, the poet's certain word choice for each song. It's easy enough to find in the titles: Born v. Thunder, an obvious idea of birth or youth and a not quite so obvious theme of coming doom or, to put it poetically, shadows on the horizon. Howabout the idea of running versus the image of a road; rebirth, exuberance, and energy, or an object on which such actions occur, driven upon, literally beat down by the ages. Okay, it should be obvious by now, I claim to see Born to Run as Bruce's everlasting anthem to the escapism of youth, and his comparable classic Thunder Road as a plea to older generations not to let go of such ideas in his other song. Still confused? Born to Run = youth, Thunder Road = old age.
All of that quasi-critical analyzation I made above is based purely and simply on word choice, an important factor in language spoken, written, shouted, whispered, or sung. Literraly the words you choose to say or write have a huge impact on how your work is experienced. To call your friend silly is something completely different than calling them foolish, although the words have similar meaning and are sometimes interchangable. The meanings of the words, connotative and denotative together, are what cause their impact. Even what words you choose to place near each other, the word's juxtaposition, add impact. For further examples, we'll keep looking at Bruce's two songs.
What exactly did I find in Born to Run to make me come to such a conclusion regarding it's idea of youthfullness? Well, for one thing, he calls her Wendy, a name associated mostly with Peter Pan, a story all about everlasting youth. Bruce also says to Wendy "We gotta get out while we're young/`cause tramps like us, baby we were born to run". That was a bit obvious, but a bit more cryptic idea is his repeating use of car words: "suicide machines...cages out on highway 9,/Chrome wheeled, fuel injected and steppin out over the line...Just wrap your legs round these velvet rims/And strap your hands across my engines..." etc, etc. Fast cars and hot babes runnin' down endless highways borderlines on cliche as a youth-full image.
Okay, on to Thunder. In contrast to Born, Thunder paints a picture more aged and worn, where the cars aren't so fast ("All the redemption I can offer girl/is beneath this dirty hood...skeleton frames of burned out Chevrolets" and the babes aren't so hot ("You ain't a beauty but hey you're alright"), but Bruce still speaks of that young hope he once had. Like the use of cars, the use of words related to prayer add a certain different impact to the song: "Make crosses from your lovers...Waste your summer praying in vain/For a saviour to rise from these streets...Heaven's waiting on down the tracks/We're riding out tonight to case the promised land...". The only adolescent image in the whole song, "Your graduation gown" loses it's juvenility with the description "lies in rags at their feet".
All of this and more has everything to do with the words Bruce chose to use in his songs. They both have similar ideas and images, but with different modifiers and descriptions. So, choose your words wisely, think, by God, think before you speak or write or shout or sing, because one small word makes all the difference.