This story originally aired on “Sunday Morning” on October 24, 2021.

A rock star and a former president hitting the road – if that sounds like a Friends movie, well, it kind of became one.

Driving a 1960 Corvette to the home of singer-songwriter Bruce Springsteen was, said former President Barack Obama, “one of the highlights of my time on that farm … getting behind the wheel of that nasty machine!”

Correspondent Anthony Mason asked Springsteen, “How old were you when you had this?”

“Twenty five.”

“And what did it mean for your life when you bought it?”

“All!” he has answered. “Because that’s all I got out of my recording contract when I was 25, it was this car and I got a piano.”

Mr. Obama said: “I admit that the secret services, normally, I am good at alerting them, but…”

“Have you just taken off? Mason asked.

“Yeah, I just took off, and in the rearview mirror I could see some of my agents running behind!” he’s laughing.

The friendship between the two men began in 2008: “Bruce Springsteen decided to charitably help a little-known new American senator who had the audacity to run for president,” Mr. Obama said.

Over time, that friendship deepened, a friendship Mr. Obama once characterized as, “I’m the president. He’s the boss.”

And in 2020, they sat together for a few days at Springsteen’s farm in New Jersey to talk about their lives and our world.

These conversations became a podcast, then a book: “Renegades: Born in the USA” (Crown).

Mason said, “You both describe each other as ‘kinda nice’.”

“I think Bruce, through his music, I tease him that it’s better to be a rock ‘n’ roll star than to be a politician,” Mr. Obama said.

“Which of course is!” Springsteen burst out laughing.

“You do get the best deal,” Mason said.

“He doesn’t really deny it! Mr. Obama said. “There’s a certain sense of ministry in Bruce’s music. And his work revolves around these questions of, you know, ‘Who are we?'”

Springsteen said: “This is the question.”

Like a minister, Springsteen urges viewers with a language of a kind of faith: “We have come here tonight because we want to build a house. … And when we build this house, we will use bare wood, and we will use the Good News that is here tonight.”

Springsteen told Mason, “What I do every night when I’m doing my job well is create a space of shared values ​​and shared narrative. For three hours, we create this place. It exists somewhere.”

Mr Obama added: “And that storytelling power is, you know, at its best, what good politics does too, isn’t it? He says, ‘This is who we are. This is a shared story that we share.'”

As presidential candidate Obama said in Philadelphia on March 18, 2008: “I have brothers, sisters, nieces, nephews, uncles and cousins, of all races and colors, scattered across three continents, and as long as I live, I will never forget that in no other country on Earth is my story even possible.”

“You get a lot of nostalgia sometimes for the 50s and ‘Leave it to Beaver’ and the Palisades,” Mr. Obama told Mason. “And it was a real shared story, except it left out a whole bunch of stuff.”

“And a lot of people.”

“People like me were left behind. I think Bruce and I sort of overlapped, there was a need to revise the story to make it inclusive.”

Springsteen said, “People need to recognize the country for what it is – its flaws, its advantages.”

Mason asked, “An interesting thing: I think a lot of people would look at that and say, ‘What’s a guy from Hawaii and a guy from New Jersey, black, white, what have- they in common? You both see each other as strangers. You talk about feeling invisible.

“Well, sure, yeah,” Springsteen said. “Perhaps that’s the story of all artists and musicians, that you start from the outside. When I was young, I felt speechless. I felt invisible. But I fought to know where I belong.”

Mr Obama said: “I joked with Bruce. I said, ‘Well, I don’t understand why a kid from New Jersey thinks he’s an alien.’ Because now I am a stranger! You know you can definitely understand why barack obama is the stranger. What I think we both shared was that feeling of having questions about, “Well, how do we fit into the existing narrative? How do we fit into the communities into which we were born? Partly because, Bruce, you said your dad was sick. My father was away.”

“Well, you both talk about having essentially absent fathers,” Mason said.

“Yeah,” Springsteen replied.

“And I think that can contribute to that feeling like, ‘I don’t know exactly how I’m supposed to behave or how I’m supposed to act,'” Obama added.

“Well, let me ask you this: You said something on the podcast, Bruce, that really struck me, that in many ways your work was really about your dad?”

“The more I think about it, the more that’s the conclusion I come to,” he replied.

“What were you doing in there?”

“Well, in a way, I tried to be him,” Springsteen said. “I tried to create a physical me that I thought he would approve of, and have the success that I thought he would approve of. But I also felt a certain kind of… that I was an instrument of revenge for the disappointments that my father had in his life. So, I started to intensely tell these working-class stories filled with both hope and compassion, but also a lot of anger. And I think Barack had a very similar situation, I mean, why did you become president? Who were you trying to impress?”

Mason said, “Well, that was my next question. Do you think that in some way your father’s absence motivated your ambition?”

“Absolutely,” replied Mr. Obama. “Yeah, my dad was away. He left when I was two years old. I only met him once. I knew him for about a month.

“It’s interesting how influential this month turned out to be.”

“Well, it’s true. I mean, I wrote an entire book called ‘Dreams From My Father,’ a guy I didn’t know.”

In their podcast conversations, they tackled difficult topics. When Mr. Obama asked, “How unusual was it to have an integrated group back then?” Springsteen replied, “I think…Why is it so hard to talk about race?…Why am I stopping here?”

For years, Springsteen’s E Street Band featured Clarence Clemons, who died in 2011. The chemistry between “The Big Man” and “The Boss” is immortalized in newly restored footage of Springsteen’s performance at the No Nukes concert at Madison. Square Garden in 1979.

Mason asked, “You say in the podcast and the book that in many ways the most important story you ever told was you and Clarence on stage together.”

“It wasn’t intellectual; it was emotional, it was the language of the heart,” Springsteen said. “But it was incredibly visual, it was more valuable than the stories I was writing in my music, you know?”

Mr Obama said: “In an ideal world, what Bruce and Clarence represented on stage was basically reconciliation, right? And redemption. But most of your audience was predominantly white. And they can love Clarence when he’s on stage, but if they ran into him in a bar, suddenly the N word comes out.”

“Yeah.”

“And part of Bruce’s music, and part of my politics, has been, ‘No, no. You have to surface. You have to talk about it. Sunlight is the disinfectant. And if you talk about it, then you can reconcile in a real way, not in a bogus way, but in a real way.”

Mason asked, “A year from now, how do you feel about midterm reviews and how is the president doing?”

“Well, listen, I think Joe Biden is pursuing exactly the policies that need to be pursued,” Mr. Obama replied. “Was he able to bridge the polarization that we’ve seen build up for several decades now? No. And to be fair to him, I haven’t been able to slow this down as much as I would have wanted, and certainly my successor, you know, actively promoted it. We’re going to have to figure out how to find the meaning of a common American history? And I think that’s going to be a longer-term project. I think that’s a 10-, 20 year project.”

“It’s generational,” Springsteen said.

“It’s a generational process. The good news is that I think there is more common history among the young people. But the older ones like us, you have to step aside!” Mr. Obama laughed.

“Yeah, there’s no turning back,” Springsteen said. “We may be momentarily polarized. But ultimately the story continues.”

And surprising things can happen: just look at the friendship between Barack Obama and Bruce Springsteen.

The 72-year-old rock star told Mason, “I think making friends as you get older, towards the end of your life, is really rewarding. And it’s kind of rare.”

“Comes from a different place too, really,” Mason said.

“It’s true.”

“And you don’t want to end up being just a lonely old man!” the 60-year-old former president laughed.

” Old man ! It’s true !

“That’s the thing we try to avoid, isn’t it?”

“Right.”

Mr. Obama added: “It’s been a hell of a trip.”

Springsteen agreed: “Life is good.”

READ AN EXTRACT FROM A BOOK: “Renegats: Born in the United States”

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Story produced by Ed Forgotson and Rebecca Castagna. Publisher: Ed Givnish.