Bruce Springsteen tried to keep his home life separate from his music career when his children were growing up.
The 75-year-old singer - who has Evan, 34, Jessica, 32, and Samuel, 30, with wife Patti Scialfa - is proud that his kids have been able to develop their own lives away from the "strangeness" of his job in the spotlight and admitted he and his spouse deliberately exposed them to as little of life in the public eye as they could.
He told The Times magazine: “When they were little, if they heard me on the radio they would go, ‘Bruce Springsteen!’ It was their way of separating their dad from this abstract character who also seemed to be a part of their lives.
“A lot of times, we just didn’t expose them to it. They came to concerts a few times before going back to their rooms to play video games, and didn’t know much about it beyond what they may have read.
"When they were older they wanted to bring their friends to the show, but apart from that they chose their own lives, developed their own work, found their own partners and families, all at a nice distance from the strangeness of my job.”
Bruce spent the 1980s living on-and-off in Los Angeles but was never "comfortable" there or in New York, so is happy he and Patti opted to raise their children in his native New Jersey and gave them a "normal" upbringing.
He said: “It’s certainly not Los Angeles. I feel safe here. This is where my people are, where the folks I wrote about are. I was never a worldly young man.
“I was not comfortable in Los Angeles for the time I lived there. I was not comfortable in New York. I don’t think you can find photographs of me falling out of nightclubs in either of them.
"And when Patti and I had children, we were not comfortable about them growing up in Los Angeles. I grew up on a block that had six houses with my relatives in them, so we came back here.
"The kids had aunts and uncles nearby and it was a good payoff for not being where the industry is: normal life.
"You know, it’s funny. You grow up in a place that you weren’t so sure about for a variety of reasons. Then, whether for nostalgia or the feeling that you’re on solid ground, you find yourself returning. Now I love my home town.”
