Bruce Springsteen shared ‘Thunder Road’ with us back in 1975. Now, the lyrics to the song will be edited, 46 years after its release.
The opening track of Bruce Springsteen’s iconic 1975 album, Born To Run has stirred up drama in the music world over the weekend.
We’ve all long thought Springsteen sings, “The screen door slams, Mary’s dress waves/ Like a vision she dances across the porch as the radio plays.”
Those were the lyrics included in the album’s notes and on every lyric sheet.
Anyway, the lyric has been confirmed to be, “Mary’s dress sways.” Sways.
The New Yorker has dug into some investigative journalism work over the weekend. They emailed Jon Landau, Bruce Springsteen’s longtime manager and the co-producer on the album itself, Born To Run.
“Short of Springsteen himself, no one could answer the question more definitively than Landau,” wrote The New Yorker.
Landau replied to the email. He wrote, “The word is ‘sways.'”
“That’s the way he wrote it in his original notebooks,” confirmed Landau.
“That’s the way he sang it on ‘Born to Run,’ in 1975, that’s the way he has always sung it at thousands of shows, and that’s the way he sings it right now on Broadway.
“Any typos in official Bruce material will be corrected,” he assured the publication.
“And, by the way, ‘dresses’ do not know how to ‘wave.’”
