Almost as soon as Born In The U.S.A. was released, people began telling different stories about what was going on with the album’s cover. Call it one sure sign of success. In somewhat the same way that Abbey Road generated interpretations, theories and myths regarding the artwork, so too did Born In The U.S.A: he’s pissing on the flag; he’s been lifting weights and wants us to see his ass; he’s a good American boy, paying tribute to his country, ball cap in his back pocket. However ungrounded these readings, there they were. Then-US president Ronald Reagan, not one for spending great amounts of time analysing album covers or rock lyrics, preferred the last of them, and publicly voiced his kinship with the artist. Springsteen, not surprisingly, wasn’t inclined to go on that blind date.

Not all album covers have that kind of immediate impact. Most don’t. Typically, the music gives the artwork meaning over time. But there are those rare ones that hook audiences straight away, that jump-start the experience of an album even before the music begins to do its work: The Clash’s London Calling. Funkadelic’s Maggot Brain. The Velvet Underground & Nico. Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp A Butterfly. To be fair, if the creation of such album covers was a simple matter, everyone would be doing it.

In his first 10 or so years on the Columbia Records roster, Springsteen showed that he took image seriously and possessed a notable intuition and sophistication regarding using visuals both to introduce an album and build an identity. When it came to cover art, he nailed it more than once.

Early in his career, Springsteen figured out how to collaborate with photographers and art directors, how to style without giving the sense that anything had been styled. Most of this was done through gut instinct and self-guided study. He learned how to reject artwork and explain why he was doing so, how to connect image and music. In a relatively brief period, he released multiple albums that had immediate-impact covers, including Born To Run and Darkness On The Edge Of Town. But Born In The U.S.A. was perhaps the most emphatic visual statement of them all. That one took you by the lapel, made sure it had your attention. You got the sense that the album was a thing of dramatic intention, like he knew exactly what he wanted to do to us and he went and did it.

Between the Annie Leibovitz photograph, with its saturated colors and aggressive cropping, and the album title itself, there was a sense that something significant, something new to the artist was inside. And as soon as you began listening to it, it was confirmed. The first song was the title track. It was a skeleton arrangement from the first verse through the first chorus, featuring Roy Bittan’s repeated synthesiser line and Max Weinberg’s massive snare drum, and it allowed the bite of Springsteen’s vocal a new kind of exposure. As an opening track, Born In The U.S.A. came on like some kind of manifesto. The album cover was a statement, the production was a statement, the song was a statement. It wasn’t a situation that had listeners stopping after the first track. And that, of course, was the idea. But Born In The U.S.A. was not an easy birth, not, in fact, a thing of deliberate intention until the very last stages of its emergence.

Springsteen’s seventh official album release was career-changing, doing its work from the moment listeners got the thing in their hands. It was a ride you got on and stayed on. But while Michael Jackson’s a near contemporary of , was the result of what its producer Quincy Jones described as a kind of military strategy, a focused, deliberate response to the poor showing at the Grammys of Jackson’s previous album , was another matter entirely. Sure, it seemed like a similar thing, as if some team was lurking in the shadows, saying: “Let’s take this motherfucker to the top.” But that’s not how it went down. It, Springsteen told me, “was just what I had lying around”.