No one has won such commercial heights as giving voice to the blue-collar American experience as New Jersey heartland rocker ‘The Boss’ Bruce Springsteen. He spent the 1970s crafting a unique anthemic roots rock songbook romanticising working-class life and the economic struggles plaguing the nation’s rust belts and industrial towns. This led to blockbuster albums like 1975’s Born to Run and 1978’s Darkness on the Edge of Town, mining folk’s rich heritage of passionate, social reportage with a reputation for gripping live shows backed by his famous E Street Band.

Springsteen’s most essential and illustrative moment of his career is the two-album punch of the early 1980s. Following the success of The River Tour, Springsteen retreated to his Colts Neck ranch with little more than his Gibson J-200 acoustic guitar and a four-track recorder and virtually cut the entirety of 1982’s haunting Nebraska. Flashing a desolate counter to President Ronald Reagan‘s plastic patriotism, Springsteen’s reach into dustbowl style ghost folk set the thematic stage for his monster follow-up while sonically bearing zero resemblance to its predecessors.

Coating his subversive critique of American foreign policy and small-town tensions in glossy synth pummel and pop heft, 1984’s Born in the USA and its mammoth title track would stand just as deceptively contrary to the Republican NeoCon fervour sweeping the nation. Selling over 20 million copies, Springsteen’s seventh LP would be one of the decade’s biggest-selling and enjoy heavy rotation on many a liberal or conservative’s turntable – even if the latter didn’t quite grasp the deeper political subtext.

Like many songwriters of his generation, one of Springsteen’s key foundational lightning bolts of inspiration came with Bob Dylan’s arrival through the coffee houses of New York’s Greenwich Village to the forefront of the late 1960s roots rock explosion. Posting a poignant statement on his official website, Springsteen honoured the original troubadour’s 2016 Nobel Prize in Literature with a piece revealing the impact Dylan’s two albums had on his youth.

“Bob Dylan is the father of my country,” Springsteen boldly claimed, “Highway 61 Revisited and Bringing It All Back Home were not only great records, but they were the first time I can remember being exposed to a truthful vision of the place I lived. The darkness and light were all there, the veil of illusion and deception ripped aside. He put his boot on the stultifying politeness and daily routine that covered corruption and decay. The world he described was all on view, in my little town, and spread out over the television that beamed into our isolated homes, but it went uncommented on and silently tolerated. He inspired me and gave me hope.”

Dylan was struck by rock ‘n’ roll’s revolution before losing himself in folk. Hungry for songs and numbers that reflected the America he knew to be underneath nationalist mythologies, a combined love of Depression era Woody Guthrie and a myriad of poets and writers across antiquity to the Beatniks fuelled the young Dylan as a lauded lyricist of the folk revival moment and rock in general.

Just as Springsteen needed to change tack with Nebraska, Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited and Bringing It All Back Home, too, stood as concerted efforts to do away with convention, confound the purist faction of his fanbase, and seek creative possibilities afforded to him beyond acoustic solo solemnity.

Dylan’s revelations to Cameron Crowe in the liner notes of 1985’s Biograph compilation reveal the fundamental allure folk brought to the creatively restless artist throughout all his stylistic trends and U-turns—a set of values that just as easily spoke to Springsteen’s lyrical conscience. As put forth by Dylan, “I knew that when I got into folk music, it was more of a serious type of thing. The songs are filled with more despair, more sadness, more triumph, more faith in the supernatural, much deeper feelings.”