Springsteen’s prolonged adolescence

Springsteen’s prolonged adolescence

Bruce Springsteen did not grow up until he was in his 40s, he tells Joe Levy in Rolling Stone. His music had already made him a working-class hero to millions, but when he divorced his first wife in 1990, married backup singer Patti Scialfa, and started a family, Springsteen had to learn some very rudimentary skills. “How do you have relationships? How do you commit to things that are forever? How do you break all of your old habits? I didn’t have a clue. All my instincts were wrong. All my instincts drove me away from things.” He was accustomed, for example, to going to bed somewhere around 3 a.m., which was fine for a musician, but didn’t suit a life of raising three young children. “I couldn’t get up in the morning. I couldn’t go to bed at night. That took about five years to figure out. Patti was, and has been, patient beyond patient.” To speed things up a bit, he spent years in psychotherapy, learning how not to be controlled by his family baggage and his past. “I learned a lot. I had to work on it the way that I had to work on playing the guitar when I first started—many, many hours and a lot of intense devotion.” Now 58, he’s become a passable father and husband. “I suppose Patti would say I’ve reached a tolerable level of competency.”

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