Iwas 18 when Bruce Springsteen’s third album, “Born to Run,” was released 50 years ago, and it couldn’t have come at a better time.

I’d just finished my freshman year in college, and I was lost. My high school girlfriend had broken up with me by letter. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life. I was stuck back in my parents’ apartment in the Bronx.

So when I dropped the record onto my Panasonic turntable and S pringsteen sang, “So you’re scared and you’re thinking/That maybe we ain’t that young anymore” on the opening track, “Thunder Road,” I felt as if he were speaking directly to me.

But no song moved me more than the album’s title track, “Born to Run.” How I longed for that sort of love – and how I also felt strangled by the “runaway American dream.” The song was about getti

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