Song 194: Today I posted Born to Run by Emmylou Harris on the playlist. Not to be confused with the Bruce Springsteen song of the same name, this song, which was written by Paul Kennerley, came out in late 1981 shortly after I moved into a house in Berkeley where I lived for most of that decade, and though it did well on the country charts, I wasn't paying much attention to any of the charts at the time, so I didn't know about it. A couple of years later, though, in adding to my Emmylou LP collection, when I got to Cimarron, I knew some of the songs but not her versions of them, so the first spin on the turntable was my first time hearing of all the recordings on that album. On first listening, I liked this song the best of the bunch, and having heard the LP many times over the last 3 decades, I'd still say so. The song is a brag, and a very appealing one at that, saying, in effect, I can't help it, I was born to be the best, to run the race and win, to get ahead of everyone else -- it's just in my DNA to be better and to do better than others. It's a common idea among teenagers and those in their twenties, and one that often fuels the creative drive of younger people, though it's not so appealing in real life if someone hangs onto it for too long. On a side note, the man who wrote this song had connected with Emmylou on an earlier project, and as it turns out, he married her a few years after this record, but then the marriage dissolved in the early 1990s.
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