46-year-old Bruce Springsteen one-word mystery finally solved

For years, Bruce Springsteen fans have argued over one word: In the 1975 song “Thunder Road”, does Mary’s dress ripple or sway?

Official words have long said the first. Many fans swear to hear the latter.

Now Springsteen’s longtime manager Jon Landau, producer of the song as well as the “Born To Run” album it appears on, has provided an answer.

“The word is ‘balance’,” Landau told The New Yorker, adding:

“This is the way he wrote it in his original notebooks, this is the way he sang it on ‘Born to Run’ in 1975, this is the way he always sang it in thousands of gigs and that’s how he sings it right now on Broadway. Any typos in Bruce’s official material will be fixed. And, by the way, “dresses” don’t know how to “wave” .

Indeed, the lyrics of the song on the official Springsteen site have been updated to “sways”.

The Bruce hubbub was inadvertently started by New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman, who recently attended Springsteen’s new Broadway show and tweeted:

As music fans argued over the word, longtime E. Street Band member Little Steven spoke up, but didn’t exactly resolve the dispute:

But as USA Today noted, the answer may be in plain sight. Springsteen’s handwritten lyrics to “Born to Run,” auctioned off by Sotheby’s in 2018, showed the word to be “balance” from the start, as Landau put it.