Great Songs from My Favorite Year in Music: 1985, Part 50

Bruce Springsteen - "I'm on Fire"



(Single Release: February 1985)
"I'm on Fire" is two minutes and thirty-seven seconds of perfection. Back before I was a Bruce convert, this song was a light in the darkness. It was the first Springsteen track I truly loved. There have been many since, especially in poring over the catalog, but "I'm on Fire" led the way. It's not just because it was first. It is quite possibly the most perfectly written, compact song. The music sounds and feels like motion, mimicking the freight train in the last verse. It is a style similar to many of the songs by Johnny Cash, which is probably why it sounded so great as a cover by the Man in Black on the Sub Pop issued Nebraska tribute. (I, for one, did not quibble about the song being from the Born in the U.S.A. sessions and not Nebraska, though it could have been, if it were just a little darker). That sense of motion propels us through the song, hearing Bruce describe his longing for someone who, while perhaps not unattainable, after all this is Bruce we're talking about, is at least attached to someone else. This is perhaps why it resonated with me. As a lovesick teen, this kind of yearning from afar was requisite. The structure of the song is also intriguing. The first two verses have the same form, with two descriptive rhyming lines (i.e., "Hey little girl is your daddy home / Did he go and leave you all alone?", then two rhyming expressions of his love, (i.e., "I got a bad desire / Oh, I'm on fire." The third verse is a bridge, in which Bruce more poetically and dramatically describes his pain. This is where it gets interesting. The fourth and final verse is a hybrid of the two, combining the three line bridge format with the two line ending of the first two verses to round out the song as it fades into the distance. As I said for Treblezine's Top 200 Songs of the 80s, where it really should have broken the top 50, "I'm on Fire" is the most haunting, passionate, subversive, erotic love song ever written. It is only kismet that it is 50th in my list, as this is not in any order of preference or rank. But again, it is two minutes and thirty-seven short seconds of perfection.