Glory Days
by Bruce Springsteen
- 117
- BPM
- A major
- Key
- 11B
- Camelot
- 58
- Danceability
- 5
- Acousticness
The first verse of "Glory Days" came from real life. In the summer of 1973 Bruce Springsteen ran into Joe DePugh, a former Little League teammate from Freehold. The encounter went into the song. When DePugh died in April 2025, Springsteen marked it with a statement that quoted the lyric about the speedball.
The song became the fifth single from Born in the U.S.A. in 1985. It reached number five on the Billboard Hot 100 that summer, the fifth of a record-tying seven Top 10 singles from the album. An alternate mix has an extra verse about the narrator's father, who worked at the Ford plant in Metuchen, New Jersey, for twenty years. Springsteen cut it as a poor fit for the story.
John Sayles directed the video, shot in New Jersey in late May 1985. Springsteen plays a man talking to his young son and pitching to a wooden backstop against an imaginary lineup. He loses to Graig Nettles. The bar scenes were filmed at Maxwell's in Hoboken, with Steven Van Zandt back for it, along with newer members Nils Lofgren and Patti Scialfa. The video earned two MTV Video Music Awards nominations.
Glory Days runs at 117 BPM, the tempo of pop, funk and disco-leaning dance. In classical terms it sits in moderato territory. A bar of 4/4 lasts 2.05 seconds, and a quarter-note delay is 513 ms. It is in A major, Camelot 11B, which shares its notes with F# minor and mixes cleanly with D major and E major.
We use multiple sources as part of our online research for the song story including Wikipedia.