When Bruce Springsteen announced the death of Adele Springsteen in February 2024, the tribute included a video of mother and son dancing together. Alongside the video, Bruce Springsteen shared words from “The Wish,” a song that had preserved memories of Adele Springsteen long before this goodbye.
At the heart of that song was a guitar. Behind the guitar was a mother who had borrowed money to help a teenage son pursue something that mattered deeply.
Adele Springsteen died on January 31, 2024, at 98. The song Bruce Springsteen chose to remember Adele Springsteen brought the story back to a time before the fame, before the E Street Band, and before audiences around the world knew the family name.
A Mother’s Investment in a Teenage Dream
Adele Springsteen worked as a legal secretary while raising a family in Freehold, New Jersey. Music and dancing were part of the household, and Adele Springsteen encouraged the enthusiasm that would eventually shape Bruce Springsteen’s life.
According to David Remnick’s 2012 profile in The New Yorker, Adele Springsteen took out a bank loan for $60 to buy a Kent guitar for Bruce Springsteen when the future musician was 15.
At that point, there was no successful recording career to justify the purchase. Bruce Springsteen was a teenager drawn to music, and Adele Springsteen was willing to borrow money to put an instrument in those hands. The importance of the gift becomes clearer when viewed from that moment, before anyone could know what would follow.
Decades later, the guitar remained part of the story Bruce Springsteen told about Adele Springsteen. “The Wish” connected that Christmas gift with a wider portrait of a working mother whose energy, reliability, and love of music had left a lasting impression.
The Song That Waited More Than a Decade
“The Wish” began during the 1987 recording sessions for Tunnel of Love, but the song did not appear on that album. The studio recording eventually reached listeners on Tracks, the collection released on November 10, 1998.
That gap is a striking part of the song’s history. A recording with such a personal subject spent more than a decade outside Bruce Springsteen’s released studio catalog. When the song finally appeared, listeners received an affectionate family portrait among the collection’s previously unreleased material.
Bruce Springsteen had already performed “The Wish” publicly before its release. At a Christic Institute benefit in Los Angeles on November 17, 1990, Bruce Springsteen introduced the song with a discussion of writing about a mother, a subject the musician treated with humor as well as tenderness.
Years later, “The Wish” became part of Springsteen on Broadway. In a show built around personal stories, the tribute gave audiences another way to understand the woman behind the childhood memories.
A Thank-You That Became Part of a Farewell
Adele Springsteen also became familiar to fans through appearances at concerts, sometimes dancing with Bruce Springsteen. Those moments gave audiences a glimpse of the joy that Bruce Springsteen had described in words and music.
When the death announcement arrived in 2024, the accompanying dance video felt connected to that public history. The words from “The Wish” reached further back, toward the working mother and the teenage boy whose musical future was still uncertain.
Bruce Springsteen had written the song while Adele Springsteen was alive. Gratitude was already there, expressed and recorded years before the farewell. That history gives the tribute particular weight: the same song could hold both the happiness of remembering a gift and the sadness of losing the person who gave it.
The $60 loan became one small, concrete detail in an extraordinary career. For anyone listening to “The Wish,” it also offers something familiar: the memory of a parent making an effort, taking a chance, and giving a child something that would never be forgotten.