"Meeting Across the River" is the seventh track on Bruce Springsteen's breakthrough 1975 album, Born to Run; it also appeared as the b-side of "Born to Run", the lead single from that album.
The song is a dark character sketch featuring a soft, haunting trumpet played by Randy Brecker and piano backing and upright bass from jazz veteran Richard Davis. Brecker's jazz-inspired horn part adds poignancy to the song and suggests a film noir feel. The lyrical, understated tune forms a bridge between the powerful "She's the One" and the album's epic finale "Jungleland". It also forms a bridge between the New Jersey-based songs throughout the Born to Run album and the New York City setting of "Jungleland". Presumably, the hoods in "Meeting Across the River" are heading over the Hudson River from New Jersey to New York to meet their connection.
The lyrics describe a low-level criminal, down on his luck but with one last chance at success for him and his friend, Eddie, that involves meeting a man across the river. Springsteen portrays his characters sympathetically. The narrator appears to be desperate; he needs to bum some money and a ride from Eddie, and his girlfriend is threatening to leave because he has pawned her radio. The details are vague, but the consequences if they fail at their task seem to be very serious, and the song's sombre tone does not imply that they will succeed. Lyrics also imply that the man has never really been qualified for crime; however, the promise of a big payoff, and the thought that this might make his girlfriend stay with him, has caused him to get in over his head. Original pressings of Born to Run billed the song as "The Heist", suggesting what the man across the river was employing the narrator and Eddie for. In some ways similar in theme to The Velvet Underground's "Waiting for the Man", "Meeting Across the River" has less urgency but is a more detailed depiction of a drug deal.
The song is often paired with "Jungleland" in concert, though without the Randy Brecker trumpet part from the record and with regular bass guitarist Garry Tallent.
The song was covered by Syd Straw in 1997.
This song led to the creation in 2005 of a book titled Meeting Across the River: Stories Inspired by the Haunting Bruce Springsteen Song.
The book is a collection of 21 fictional short stories by various authors edited by Jessica Kaye and Richard Brewer. Each story expands on the spare 215 word sketch of a world created in the Springsteen song by detailing a unique and wide ranging collection of divergent and unexpected times, places and characters.
Read more about Meeting Across The River: Personnel
Famous quotes containing the words meeting and/or river:
“Is whispering nothing?
Is leaning cheek to cheek? Is meeting noses?
Kissing with inside lip? Stopping the career
Of laughter with a sigh?—a note infallible
Of breaking honesty.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“Every incident connected with the breaking up of the rivers and ponds and the settling of the weather is particularly interesting to us who live in a climate of so great extremes. When the warmer days come, they who dwell near the river hear the ice crack at night with a startling whoop as loud as artillery, as if its icy fetters were rent from end to end, and within a few days see it rapidly going out. So the alligator comes out of the mud with quakings of the earth.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)