Thunder Road (Introduction) [Springsteen on Broadway]

[Spoken]
There's nothing like being young and leaving someplace. That was a feeling that, oh, I loved. Maybe that's why I became a musician. Um, sleep late, stay up late, and you do an awful lot of leavin'. The night I left Freehold for the last time, I laid back on the couch that was perched high atop a load of the band's junk furniture in the back of an open flatbed truck on a beautiful summer night. I was 19 years old. That felt pretty good. Soft ocean breeze of the shore was reaching all the way inland, and as we drew through town, for the very last time, we were stopped by the police, who informed us that there was a law against moving after dark. What the fuck?

Who the fuck would know that? Don't move your shit after dark? What are we running off: one of Freehold's great antiquities? The sun goes down, they'll bust your ass in Freehold, son. Anyway, they uh, they sent us on our way, glad to be rid of the town hippies I guess, and so I laid back on my couch, and I was watchin' the tree branches brush above me and the stars glowing in the night sky, and I remember it felt absolutely wonderful

I had nothin'. No parents, they'd moved away with my, little sister Pam, to California in 1969. My sister Virginia, great soul that she is, she got pregnant and had a baby at 18, she left high school, married a competitive bull rider, and they moved into the wilds of southern New Jersey because, that's where the cowboys live. The real joke is that fifty years later, they're still together and they still go to the rodeo

But I had no money and no family and no realistic future but yet I remember layin' on that couch with the summer wind rushin' over me, and ya know that salt water smell in the air of the shore comin' on, thinkin', I was just happy, I was happy. I got it all, ya know, maybe I did, ya know. Maybe there was nothing like that moment in your life with being young and leaving some place, all that youthful freedom, you feel, finally being untethered from everything you've ever known, the life you've lived, the past, your parents, the world you've gotten used to and that you've loved and hated

Your life laying before you like a blank page. It's the one thing I miss about getting older, I miss the beauty of that blank page, so much life in front of ya. Its promise, its possibilities, its mysteries, its adventures. That blank page, just layin' there, daring you to write on it