The Boss: On The Road Alone

Bruce Springsteen Talks About Performing Solo Again

(CBS)  The title track on "Devils & Dust" is a song about the Iraqi war from a soldier's perspective. How do these characters slip into Bruce Springsteen's head?

"Well, I have a familiarity with the crushing hand of fate, you know, that I grew up with and lived with as a child, you know," he says.

A guitar allowed him to rise above his working class roots and to feel the hand of fortune, too. But somehow, Springsteen says, those two hands never cancel each other out.

"If you look at the internal lives of a lot of the characters that I've written about, that heavy hand of fate…and the inability to get out from underneath it is what they have in common," he explains. "It's what I have in common with them."

There is another Springsteen, of course: the iconic rocker, who can still fill football stadiums and sold more than 20 million copies of "Born in the USA." But many of his fans forget that Springsteen was originally signed as a solo artist.

He was a young folksinger in 1972, when he submitted an audition tape to Columbia Records. The kid from Freehold, N.J., seemed to have eyes that could see through America.

Says photographer Frank Stefanko, who took the cover shots for two of Springsteen's early albums, "When I looked at those eyes, they were just so big… He was this slender, hungry guy who had all this energy and all this ambition. And that's the person I shot."

(An exhibit of Stefanko's pictures is on display through June 8 at the Morrison Hotel Gallery in New York City.)

But audiences have seen many different Springsteens: the electrifying performer, the pop superstar, the rock legend.

Mason points out to him: "I can't think of too many other artists who have the sort of burden of expectations that you seem to have. I mean people, so many people, seem invested in you in a lot of different ways."

Springsteen's reaction: "You can't think about that too much. My approach is: If I like it enough to say it's a record, I put it out, and whatever happens, happens, you know."