Bruce Springsteen fans are just realising the heartbreakingly “mundane” meaning behind The River song, Drive All Night.
In a post to the r/BruceSpringsteen forum, users shared the “haunting slow burn” of a song and wondered what the original meaning could be. One user asked: “What’s the story in Drive All Night? This is one of the most haunting slow-burn songs in rock history, just love it and while [David] Bowie does a beautiful drawn-out vocal, nobody beats the “Heaaaaaaaaaarrrrrrrrt and soul” than Bruce Springsteen. But what’s up with the story itself? Buy some shoes in the middle of the night? Trying to hit the Black Friday sales in the AM?” Users have since shared the “pretty simple” meaning behind the song.
One wrote: “Pretty simple, he’s so heartbroken from his ex moving away he’s desperate to do even mundane things like shoe shopping.” The story has been picked apart by Springsteen fans, with some reportedly unable to believe the song has this simple a story to it.
Another user replied: “People on the forum Backstreets used to always argue about it all the time and I just could not understand how people couldn’t grasp this.” Other users have since praised the meaning behind Drive All Night and say it fares well on the stage. They wrote: “I thought it was one of the better songs live on The River tour, compared with the album version.”
A second user agreed, adding: “It was a centrepiece of the original River tour, compared with the album version.” A third wrote: “I find that the album version delivers a harder punch with the sudden onset of ‘heart’, no beat in between, but in many live versions he took a beat.”
Other users disagreed with the original meaning and say it could be a “metaphor” rather than a literal take. They wrote: “It’s not about buying shoes in the middle in the middle of the night. It’s a metaphor. Or if you want to think about but ‘logistically’.
What’s the story in Drive All Night?
byu/SnooPeppers2353 inBruceSpringsteen
“A guy’s in a long distance relationship, he gets off of work in the evening and instead of going home he drives the whole night to be there in the morning with his girl and they go shopping that day. And he can say ‘hey, I came all this way just to buy you some shoes’.”
Another wrote: “Oh come on. You can get the metaphorical sense of he’d do anything for the one he loves. It’s called passion, and he holds her so high in his heart and mind that he’d do the most minute, mundane task for her if it meant something to HER. Chivalry is not dead to Bruce, but if you can’t see the meaning behind the words, then…”
The original poster replied: “Sure I can. Still find it a funny detail to mention. Even if I don’t get the logistics of the action, the music sure explains it.”
