Happy new year.

One highlight from 2025 was getting to interview Peter Ames Carlin about his new book, Tonight in Jungleland, which details the making of Bruce Springsteen’s Born to Run.

An edited transcript of that interview was published on my friend Kevin Koczwara’s substack, A Fan’s Notes. I love his substack, and I think you should subscribe to it. He interviews a lot of authors and every once in a while publishes his own long-form pieces, as he did recently with a deep dive into his love of Denis Johnson.

To kick off the new year, I’ve decided to share the full audio of my Peter Ames Carlin interview. Some of you have asked about it, so here you go. Peter’s a really nice guy, and I greatly appreciated his time. You can see my original write-up about the book below.

Among Bruce Springsteen diehards, the story of his third album is familiar—an essential part of the legend.

In his tiny corner of the universe, the scrawny kid from Jersey had earned a reputation as a magnetic, must-be-seen-to-be-believed frontman and guitar player. On the strength of his songwriting, he’d signed with Columbia Records and was hailed as the next big thing. Maybe even the next Bob Dylan! (The real Bob Dylan was still in his 30s at the time.)

But the first two albums didn’t sell. Changes were made uptown. Clive Davis, one of Bruce’s biggest backers at Columbia, left the label. The executives who remained weren’t really interested. They agreed to give him the money to record one song, and if that song was good enough to be a single, then they’d let him and the band back in the studio for a third album. But that was a big “if.”

The song he wrote would also give the album its name: “Born to Run.”

Cast in the light of the fifty years that followed—fifty years that have included life-changing concerts, culture-defining albums, presidential audiences, twenty-one Grammys, an Oscar, a Tony, a Golden Globe—it can be hard to really grasp how close it all came to not happening.

With his new book, Tonight in Jungleland: The Making of Born to Run, Peter Ames Carlin sets out to show us. But beneath the riveting human drama—managers making frantic calls, executives only half-listening to the music, skeptics becoming converts, and Springsteen himself, upon hearing the finished record, threatening to scrap the whole damn thing—Carlin tries to answer the question at the heart of the story: How did it all get so great?

There’s no denying that Born to Run represented a giant leap forward in Springsteen’s writing. But how? Was it the pressure? A natural progression in his songwriting? The partnership of the writer-turned-producer-and-confidant Jon Landau? The doggedness of his manager Mike Appel? The engineering of Jimmy Iovine? For Carlin, it’s all of these answers and more. But it also ultimately comes down to one man’s vision and his determination, bordering on madness, to realize it.

That question, the one that animates the book—How did it all get so great?—appears in the book’s prologue, spoken to Carlin by Charley Cross. Cross was a great chronicler of the life and work of Bruce Springsteen and the founder of the beloved Backstreets magazine, which covered all things Springsteen for more than four decades. Cross died just a week after posing this question. The book is dedicated to him.

This feels significant. Springsteen considers his career one long conversation with his audience, and that conversation has come to include all of us who have been graced with this connection to his work. We talk to each other; we compare notes. I know people who don’t get it, and I have a curse of recalling every critical word anyone has ever spoken about Springsteen in my presence. But for those of who do get it—who feel it and live it every day—Springsteen’s artistry reaches a very deep place. Carlin is such a person and such a writer. He is, before he is anything, a fan, a guy who knows what it means to learn more from a three-minute record than we ever learned in school. Opening the book with a conversation with another person so graced is a fitting tribute, and appropriate to the book’s subject. Not to presume, but I believe Charley Cross would be proud of the result.

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