{"id":6282,"date":"2026-09-19T10:08:29","date_gmt":"2026-09-19T14:08:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/?p=6282"},"modified":"2026-09-19T14:23:42","modified_gmt":"2026-09-19T18:23:42","slug":"im-on-fire","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/im-on-fire\/","title":{"rendered":"I&#8217;m On Fire (Bruce Springsteen)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"I&amp;apos;m On Fire (Bruce Springsteen, of course)\" width=\"474\" height=\"267\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/y6dg-_970II?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>I always appreciated Bruce Springsteen, but never saw him live or owned any of his records. My aunt Marie saw him many, many times, because she was best friends with Jon Landau&#8217;s mother; lots of my friends were devoted fans; and the music felt like something I should like more&#8230; but when I actually listened, it didn&#8217;t click with me. <img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-6284 alignright\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2027\/08\/borntoruncover-e1787861384161.jpeg?resize=198%2C190&#038;ssl=1\" alt=\"\" width=\"198\" height=\"190\" \/>I&#8217;m sure if I&#8217;d seen him back when my friends first saw him, I&#8217;d have been hooked and that would have carried over to the records, but I didn&#8217;t and it didn&#8217;t.<\/p>\n<p>As a result, this is the only Springsteen song I know, and I only know it because it was a staple of my friend Peter Keane&#8217;s sets, back when he was a college student in Cambridge, performing at the Nameless Coffeehouse. I&#8217;ve <a href=\"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/shake-sugaree\/\">written about Peter before<\/a>, and the audiences of young women who would scream and sigh at his Nameless sets &#8212; not at all the norm for that room, which was a free folk coffeehouse in a Unitarian church and tended to draw an older crowd and be more sedate.<\/p>\n<p>This was one of Peter&#8217;s killer songs, and I still picture him singing it, squinting into the stage lights, tense and blond and sexy &#8212; like the screaming women, that description will embarrass him, but it was his choice to do the song and what the hell else is &#8220;I&#8217;m On Fire&#8221; about?<\/p>\n<p>I heard Springsteen&#8217;s version after hearing Peter do it, not on a record but on MTV. As I recall, Springsteen had resisted MTV, insisting on them using live videos of his previous hits rather than lip-syncing to his studio recordings, but for this one he took a different tack: he still didn&#8217;t lip-sync, but appeared in a little movie, acting the part of a <img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignleft wp-image-6285\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2027\/08\/Im_on_fire_video-e1787861536273.png?resize=194%2C171&#038;ssl=1\" alt=\"\" width=\"194\" height=\"171\" \/>garage mechanic pining after a rich woman who leaves her car for him to fix.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ve had a bunch of arguments about Springsteen over the years with Jack Landron, who had an earlier career as Jackie Washington, Cambridge&#8217;s Black Latino folksinging star. Jack is endlessly irritated by Springsteen wearing jeans and a t-shirt onstage. &#8220;He always looks to me like he came to fix the car,&#8221; Jack says. And yes, he does, and it works fine for me and his fans, but I understand why Jack is irritated. Clarence Clemons never dressed like a car mechanic, because he would not have enjoyed being mistaken for a car mechanic.<\/p>\n<p>Those arguments made me think about Springsteen&#8217;s relationship to Black music and musicians, and when I read his autobiography, he gets into that and his background in a way that pulled me in more directly than his records had. Around the same time, I was asked to contribute a piece to a Springsteen anthology, so I went back and listened to his early records and bootlegs of live shows, and wrote a piece called &#8220;<a href=\"https:\/\/elijahwald.com\/Springsteenand.html\">American Skin: Springsteen and Blackness<\/a>.&#8221; I hoped it would spark some conversations, but never met anyone who had read it, so now I&#8217;ve posted it, and if anyone wants to have a conversation about it, positively or negatively, you can find me on social media or my email is on the first page of my website.<\/p>\n<p>Finally&#8230; this song worked great for Peter, back when he was in his early twenties, and obviously worked fine for Springsteen. But frankly, if you&#8217;re not entranced by the singer, the lyric is pretty creepy: &#8220;Hey little girl, is your daddy home? Did he go away and leave you all alone? Oh, I&#8217;ve got a bad desire&#8230;&#8221; So I&#8217;m posting it, because I know it and it reminds me of good times and Peter&#8217;s performances, and I do appreciate Springsteen&#8230; but otherwise I&#8217;ll let it alone.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I always appreciated Bruce Springsteen, but never saw him live or owned any of his records. My aunt Marie saw him many, many times, because she was best friends with Jon Landau&#8217;s mother; lots of my friends were devoted fans; and the music felt like something I should like more&#8230; but when I actually listened, &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/im-on-fire\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">I&#8217;m On Fire (Bruce Springsteen)<\/span> <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6282","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v28.5 - 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I had met Peter sometime in the early 1980s, by lucky happenstance: I was playing a street pitch on Holyoke Plaza in Harvard Square, he was a freshman in Harvard Yard, he'd been\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/11\/EW-and-Peter-Keane-at-passim-poster-1987.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":2975,"url":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/honky-tonk-heroes\/","url_meta":{"origin":6282,"position":1},"title":"Honky Tonk Heroes (Waylon Jennings)","author":"Elijah Wald","date":"July 21, 2017","format":false,"excerpt":"I owe this song and my further acquaintance with Waylon's ouevre -- and much else -- to Peter Guralnick. I first became tangentially aware of Peter when I got into blues as a kid and my mother mentioned that Dr. Guralnick's son wrote about blues. Dr. Guralnick had removed her\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/07\/Peter-Guralnick-Lost-Highway-193x300.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":4013,"url":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/barnyard-dance\/","url_meta":{"origin":6282,"position":2},"title":"Barnyard Dance (Howard Armstrong)","author":"Elijah Wald","date":"September 29, 2018","format":false,"excerpt":"My proudest musical memory is the five years I played guitar for Howard Armstrong. I'd heard Howard's old records as Louie Bluie and his later ones with Martin, Bogan, and Armstrong; I'd seen Terry Zwigoff's film about him; and I'd learned some of Carl Martin's songs... but I ended up\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/09\/howard-elijah-robbie-2.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200,"srcset":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/09\/howard-elijah-robbie-2.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1 1x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/09\/howard-elijah-robbie-2.jpg?resize=525%2C300&ssl=1 1.5x"},"classes":[]},{"id":3099,"url":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/readin-ritin\/","url_meta":{"origin":6282,"position":3},"title":"Readin&#8217;, Ritin&#8217;, and Route 23 (Dwight Yoakam)","author":"Elijah Wald","date":"September 30, 2017","format":false,"excerpt":"The first time Dwight Yoakam's \"Guitars, Cadillacs\" came on the radio, I was driving through eastern Montana and it was the perfect soundtrack. That was 1986 and it was getting played pretty often, though not as often as his version of \"Honky Tonk Man,\" and as soon as I got\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/08\/dwight-yoakam-guitars-lp.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":820,"url":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/euphoria\/","url_meta":{"origin":6282,"position":4},"title":"Euphoria (The Holy Modal Rounders)","author":"Elijah Wald","date":"April 30, 2016","format":false,"excerpt":"My take on an early psychedelic hillbilly favorite from the Holy Modal Rounders, with thanks to my uncle Sascha, and love to Peter Stampfel.","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"Fantasy blues sampler","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/03\/Fantasy-blues-sampler-e1459388602923.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":1484,"url":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/aint-misbehavin\/","url_meta":{"origin":6282,"position":5},"title":"Ain&#8217;t Misbehavin&#8217; (Leon Redbone)","author":"Elijah Wald","date":"June 23, 2016","format":false,"excerpt":"A classic from Fats Waller and Andy Razaf, which I first recall hearing from Leon Redbone, thanks to Saturday Night Live... back in the golden era when that show was a provocation rather than an institution, and gave space to unknown oddities like Mr. Redbone.","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"redbone on snl","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/05\/redbone-on-snl.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]}],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6282","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6282"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6282\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6326,"href":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6282\/revisions\/6326"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6282"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6282"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6282"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}