Springsteen sought to emulate Phil Spector's Wall of Sound production, leading to prolonged sessions with the E Street Band lasting from January 1974 to July 1975; six months alone were spent working on the title track.

The album cover, featuring Springsteen leaning on E Street Band saxophonist Clarence Clemons's shoulder, is considered iconic and has been imitated by various musicians and in other media.

[5][13] Inspired by the musical sounds and lyrical themes of 1950s and 1960s rock and roll artists such as Duane Eddy, Roy Orbison, Elvis Presley, Phil Spector, the Beach Boys, and Bob Dylan, Springsteen began composing what became "Born to Run".

[18][25] Springsteen's perfectionism led to grueling sessions:[26] he obsessed over every syllable, note, and tone of every texture, and he struggled to capture the sounds he heard in his head on tape.

[18][26] As he kept rewriting the lyrics,[29] Springsteen and Appel created several mixes containing electric and acoustic guitars, piano, organ, horns, synthesizers, and a glockenspiel, as well as strings and female backing vocalists.

[37] The band made attempts at "Jungleland", "She's the One", "Lovers in the Cold", "Backstreets", and "So Young and in Love", but faulty equipment and Springsteen's lack of direction halted progress.

[65][66] For "Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out", Springsteen hired the Brecker Brothers (Randy and Michael), David Sanborn, and Wayne Andre to play horn parts.

[87][88] The author Peter Ames Carlin states that the album captures "the essence of fifties rock 'n' roll and the beatnik poetry of sixties folk-rock, projected onto the battered spirit of mid-seventies America".

[93] The record's production is similar to Phil Spector's Wall of Sound,[90][94] in which layers of instruments and complex arrangements are combined to make each song resemble a symphony.

[95][97] The writer Frank Rose emphasized Springsteen's homage to girl groups from the 1960s, such as the Shirelles, the Ronettes, and the Shangri-Las, ones who embellished themes of heartbreak and doo-wop sounds produced by Spector.

[108] Carlin writes that Springsteen's hopeful songs, containing ideals such as that a road can take you anywhere, were "stunning" during a period marked by assassinations, war, political corruption, and collapse of the hippie subculture.

[109] Springsteen worked a "very, very long" time writing the lyrics because he wanted to avoid tropes of "classic rock 'n' roll clichés", turning them instead into fully developed and emotional characters: "It was the beginning of the creation of a certain world that all my others would refer back to, resonate off of, for the next 20 or 30 years.

[104] Unlike Greetings and Wild, however, most of the songs on Born to Run are not specifically tied to New Jersey and New York, instead shifting to all of the United States in an attempt to be more accessible to a wider audience.

[26] AllMusic's Jason Ankeny described the song as "a celebration of the rock & roll spirit, capturing the music's youthful abandon, delirious passion, and extraordinary promise with cinematic exhilaration".

[36][118][131][132] The jazzy[11] "Meeting Across the River" musically and lyrically departs from the previous songs,[133] utilizing piano and trumpet to create what Margotin and Guesdon describe as a "film noir jazz ambience" that "clashes with the other tracks".

[65] In it, the narrator and his partner Eddie are small-time gangsters who plan an illegal deal across the Hudson River, striving for a big score that will earn him a large amount of money to impress his girlfriend.

[38][135] With a dark atmosphere,[38] the track observes a New Jersey gang member known as the Magic Rat, who escapes law enforcement in Harlem with his unnamed partner referred to as the "barefoot girl".

[1][147] Outside of music, the webcomic strip Kevin and Kell imitated the pose on a Sunday strip entitled "Born to Migrate", featuring Kevin Dewclaw as Springsteen with a carrot and Kell Dewclaw as Clemons with a pile of bones, and the Sesame Street characters Bert and the Cookie Monster imitated the pose on the cover of the Sesame Street album Born to Add.

The first, "Born to Run" with "Meeting Across the River" as the B-side, was released on August 25, 1975,[26] reached number 23 on the Billboard Hot 100,[172] and proved popular with radio stations and live audiences.

[187] In his 1999 book Flowers in the Dustbin, former Rolling Stone and Newsweek writer James Miller wrote that the "mass-marketing" of Springsteen in the U.S. and David Bowie's Ziggy Stardust in the U.K. led to the notion that "the age of innocence in rock was well and truly over—probably forever".

[179] In The Village Voice, Robert Christgau felt that Springsteen condenses a significant amount of American myth into songs, and often succeeds in spite of his tendency for histrionics and "pseudotragic beautiful loser fatalism".

[192][201] Some critics, including Bangs and Cocks,[197][202] hailed Springsteen as a visionary destined to save the rock genre[203] from, in Stephen Holden's words, "its present state of enervation".

[196] Born to Run received negative reviews from a few critics, who found the production excessive and "heavy-handed",[193][205] the songs "formulaic",[205] "an effusive jumble" and "undistinguished",[178] and felt Springsteen himself lacked a definitive vocal personality.

[206] More moderately, Jerry Gilbert of Sounds believed Born to Run was not as "essential" as Greetings and Wild, but had enough "distinction" from the two albums to stand on its own: "I have grown to love it but newcomers to Bruce's music would be better advised to check out what the critics have been raving about in the past.

[210] Springsteen and the E Street Band—Bittan, Clemons, Federici, Tallent, Weinberg, and Van Zandt—continued touring the U.S. throughout the remainder of 1975 to promote Born to Run, performing to larger audiences following the album's success.

[212] Springsteen was displeased with the venue's advertisements, personally tearing down the lobby posters and ordered the buttons with Landau's "future of rock and roll" quote printed on them not be given out.

[106] Springsteen and the E Street Band have performed Born to Run in its entirety on several occasions,[91] including at the Count Basie Theatre in Red Bank, New Jersey, on May 7, 2008,[243] at the United Center in Chicago, Illinois, on September 20, 2009,[244] and other shows on the fall 2009 leg of the Working on a Dream Tour.

[246] The full album was again performed on June 20, 2013, at the Ricoh Arena in Coventry, England, and dedicated to the memory of the actor James Gandolfini, who had died of a heart attack the previous day.

[269] Another writer from The Guardian, Michael Hann, said Born to Run was "the album where Springsteen starts to make the transition from a musician to an idea, a representation of a set of personal and musical values".

[94] In a later piece for Blender magazine, Christgau wrote that the record's major flaw was its pompous declaration of greatness, typified by elements such as the "wall-of-sound, white-soul-at-the-opera-house" aesthetic and an "unresolved quest narrative".