When I was seven, I was in the car with my brother and we were listening to Good Charlotte’s self-titled debut. I remember their song “Walk By” came on, it stopped me cold. It was simple, just some guitar chords and a voice, but something about it blew seven-year-old me’s mind.
I told my brother, “This song, I like it. I like the words,”
“That’s good,” he told me. “The words are the most important part.”
The words are the most important part.
Over the years, that’s become even more true for me. Without words, there’s no story. And without a story, there’s really no song — or no song I’d want to spend time listening to.
So today I’m starting a new series called Well-Versed. It’s about what makes great lyrics great. We’re going to do this by highlighting my favorite verses from some of my favorite songs, taking a deep dive into why it works, and why it resonates with us — or, at least, why it resonates with me. In this essay, I want to look at the third verse from Bruce Springsteen’s “Badlands.”
The verse goes as follows:
For the ones who had a notion, a notion deep inside
That it ain’t no sin to be glad you’re alive
I wanna find one face that ain’t looking through me
I wanna find one place, I wanna spit in the face of these Badlands
First, let’s take a step back and discuss the context of this song. It’s the leadoff track on Darkness on the Edge of Town. In his memoir, Bruce said the following about writing this album:
“By 1977, in true American fashion, I’d escaped the shackles of my birth, personal history and, finally, place, but something wasn’t right. Rather than exhilaration, I felt unease. I sensed there was a great difference between unfettered personal license & real freedom… Such were the circumstances that led the lovers I’d envisioned in “Born to Run,” so determined to head out and away, to turn their car around and head back to town. That’s where the real deal was going down, amongst the brethren. I began to ask myself some new questions. I felt accountable to the people I’d grown alongside of and I needed to address that feeling…. I didn’t want out. I wanted in. I didn’t want to erase, escape, forget or reject. I wanted to understand. What were the social forces that held my parents lives in check?”
This is the world we’re immediately dropped into when we first hear “Badlands.” Bruce isn’t writing about adolescent dreams of escape. Instead, he’s revisiting the world he grew up in, the world of the everyday grinding struggle that so many of us know too well.
And that’s part of the power of this song — it’s about people like us. This becomes clear right from the get-go when he sings the first line:
For the ones who had a notion, a notion deep inside
He opens this verse by addressing exactly who he’s writing for (by saying “for the ones”). Now, who are these “ones”? They’re us. I think we all instinctively identify as being a part of the group that he’s addressing. After all, who doesn’t have “a notion deep inside?” Who doesn’t have a secret inner life filled with hopes and dreams that no one knows about?
In the context of the “badlands” that the song’s about, Bruce, in the first three words, separates the world into two groups: the “ones” that this song is for (aka the ones who want to find a sense of meaning and purpose in their lives) and everyone else (aka the ones who tell us to shut up and do your job, “The Man”).
By leading off the verse like his, he’s already got us in the palm of his hands. He’s earned our permission; he can now lead us wherever he wants to go, even if that’s deep into our own psyche, where our unmet desires live. That’s exactly where he takes us, and it’s exactly what Bruce does so well. He takes the political and boils it down to the personal. This a song that is informed by the socioeconomic realities of the 70’s — the same realities that are still present today and prevent a lot of us that keep us from living the lives we want. But Bruce doesn’t just show us this, he makes us feel it. The personal is political. So that’s the notion Bruce says we have? Let’s look at the second line:
That it ain’t no sin to be glad you’re alive
There’s one keyword in this line: sin. Springsteen has talked a lot about his Catholic upbringing and how it’s influenced his writing. I think that comes through in full-force on this line. And it’s a big reason why this verse resonates with me. Some of my earliest memories involve my own Catholic background. I remember worrying about sinning and going to hell all the time. After all, as a kid, I thought, wasn’t the word hell a swear? And wasn’t swearing a sin? Would even thinking about the word itself be enough for me to be a sinner, and therefore commit my soul to eternal damnation? We weren’t extremely Catholic, but that influence was still there, and it’s the kind of thing that stays rooted for generations.
So when I hear the second line of this verse, I hear it as the narrator’s rejection of a kind of “Catholic Guilt.” After all, in Catholicism, we’re all born into a state of sin. Life itself is inherently sinful. However obvious it may seem, in this context, embracing the joy of personal pleasure amidst the working-class, Catholic background that Bruce writes about can seem like a true act of defiance.
Now there’s a turn that happens halfway through this verse. During the first half o, the narrator is talking directly to the listener. But during the second half, it switches to the first person. If you look at this on paper, it seems a little incoherent — what happened “the ones” with “a notion deep inside”? But listening to it, you don’t get feel this incoherence at all. The change of perspective works. I think there’s a reason for this, and it lies in its meter.
First, let’s take a second and discuss poetic meter in the English language (and I promise, I’m going to keep this short):
Every line in poetry is made up of feet. It’s the most basic unit of measurement, and it typically involves a stressed syllable, and an unstressed syllable or syllables. The opening line in the verse has, essentially, six feet. The second line has seven. I think the increase in the line length is critical here — it gives the verse a cascading feel, like a rolling stone picking up momentum. When we arrive at the third line, that momentum has already been built up, and it’s as if the narrator gets carried away by this excitement when he takes the energy he had directed towards “the ones” (aka the listener), and redirects it towards himself.
Logically, this doesn’t jar us because the narrator has already established that we’re on the same team in the first line. So, in a sense, so what’s true for him must, therefore, be true to the listener as well. And that’s why we’re right there with him, emotionally, when he says:
I wanna find one face that ain’t looking through me
It’s a simple universal call for agency. The narrator is beaten down. He’s been dehumanized by the world he lives in, something that’s too easy for all of us to feel. But it doesn’t stop there — he’s angry about it too:
I wanna find one place, I wanna spit in the face of these Badlands
Throughout the verse, it feels like Bruce is always trying to squeeze in one more syllable, but the cascading cadence hits its apex, both emotionally and melodically, when it finally spills over into the first words of the chorus: “Badlands.” It’s also what this song is all about. This moment serves as the perfect punctuation to end this verse.
Now that we’ve analyzed the actual words of the lyrics, I want to examine the sound behind it. These lyrics can sound sad on their own. But for a song called Badlands, it doesn’t feel that bad. Sonically, it doesn’t stray very far away from a I — V — IV chord progression — one of the happiest sounding chord progression there is.
When you couple this harmonic content with Max Weinsten’s drumming, that’s when the magic happens. The snare hits on every downbeat, and it sounds like a march. You hear the sound, and you literally want to go out and march. It’s the sound of defiance, of action and agency, of taking it to the streets to — to go out there, and, as Bruce sings earlier in the song, “find out what I got.”
On top of this groove, Bruce’s melody continually rises higher and higher, upping the intensity (which, works in a similar way to how the meter keeps getting a bit longer). This keeps happening until the climactic moment where it hits right into the final chorus.
So while the lyrics are all about what it’s like to live in the dehumanizing world of economic stagnation, when you’re listening to it, you’re not brought to any place that’s actually “bad.” The sound and the words put you in a liminal space, where it feels like it’s make-or-break time. But the song doesn’t tell you what happens. It leaves you hanging there, the adrenaline pumping in your veins, waiting for that moment redemption in a regular life — which is, inevitably, the greatest redemption there is.
Now, what exactly is a “badland” and why is Bruce using it? The OED defines a badlands as “extensive tracts of severely eroded, uncultivable land characterized by uneven rocky terrain and sparse vegetation, specifically…. those occupying a barren plateau region of Western North America.”
So one reason Bruce uses this word as the hook is that it’s a quintessentially American word and he’s writing about a quintessentially American experience. But the idea of erosion and roughness plays a huge part in the power here. I think Bruce is saying is that there’s a mythology of the self-made man in America, but, if that was ever possible, it’s certainly not anymore. That sense of opportunity has eroded away, and all we’re living with barren leftovers.
This is even more relevant today than it was in the 70s. We haven’t stopped the erosion — if anything, it’s picked up the pace. The lack of socioeconomic mobility has only increased and the disparity in wealth has only grown. Now, more than ever, any town across America is like Bruce’s “Badlands” — broken, rough remnants of a system that no longer works for us. And there isn’t much going on to change it. Politicians work for their own best interests and state-sanctioned violence is used almost exclusively to reinforce the status quo of society. I think it’s clear to everyone that this status quo systemically disadvantages groups of people across racial and socioeconomic lines, just as it always has.
I think that Springsteen understands this. But I don’t think song — and this verse in particular — tells us to accept things as they are. The answer is anger. And we should be angry. The world we live in can be better than this. If we’re living in the badlands, the least you can do is spit in the face of it. We live in a world of broken institutions. The answer is not apathy.
Let’s use the anger we’re all feeling as a motivating force for change.
Did you like reading this essay? You can enjoy it in audio form on the podcast version here.
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