NEED TO KNOW
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Alana Springsteen says her Illinois family has fielded mistaken calls for Bruce Springsteen for generations
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The 26-year-old released her second studio album, I Hope This Helps, earlier this year
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She credits therapy with helping shape the album and address difficult experiences from her past
Alana Springsteen has no familial relationship with another very famous singer of the same last name, but that hasn’t stopped people from assuming there’s a connection.
“I get it a lot,” she said of people sliding into her DMs, thinking she’s the daughter of Bruce Springsteen. “My dad always jokes, because he grew up in a small town in Illinois back when they had phone books, and they were the only Springsteen in the phone book. And his mom’s name is Brenda, so it would show up as B. Springsteen. People would call the house and be like, ‘Is Bruce there?’ And he’s like, ‘Oh, he’s in the shower.’ It’s been a thing for my whole family my whole life, so you expect it.”
One thing Springsteen and The Boss have in common is their love of creating music.
Earlier this year, the country star, 26, released her second studio album, I Hope This Helps, in which she dives deep into self-discovery.
“These tools — somatic therapy, talk therapy, EMDR — are all of these things that have changed my life in the past three years, and felt like I was at this crossroads where I either could choose myself for the first time and do the work, or just continue perpetuating some of these cycles and letting it come out in every year of my life. I chose me, and I started doing the work, and I had this album to show for it,” Springsteen said. “It basically has documented three of the most transformative years of my life.”
In crafting the album, she said her therapist often heard the songs before anyone else.
“Sometimes I would take a song to my therapist. Sometimes I would take something I talked about with my therapist into the writing room,” she said. “I feel like I co-wrote this album with therapy in a lot of ways. I couldn’t have done it without it.”
Alana Springsteen at the Not Alone Awards in Las Vegas on Nov. 2, 2026
Credit: Greg Doherty/Getty
Following one session of eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR), she wrote “Note to Self,” a deeply honest song about the less-than-glamorous parts of her life.
“I wrote about my eating disorder that I dealt with in my teens for the first time, some of the things I carried as a little kid that I had never talked to my mom about,” she said. “Writing that song was terrifying and healing all at once, and it really facilitated some of these conversations with my family that I probably wouldn’t have been able to have otherwise.”
Music has always been how Springsteen has her hardest conversations, and therapy is a big part of Springsteen’s life, and she’s most certainly not shying away from it, even attending the Not Alone Summit in Las Vegas, which focuses on advancing mental health.
“Growing up around a lot of unhealed personalities, a lot of trauma, that had a really deep effect on me that I didn’t realize until many, many years later, so I was missing red flags,” she said. “I dated some horrible people, and me now, I would’ve been like, ‘Oh, run the other way.’ But some of those things you miss when you’re not in touch with yourself, and I learned to just push everything down and be the steady one, be the strong one, take care of everybody else. But you don’t realize the effects that that’s having on your body and in your life until you actually do the work and face it.”
Read the original article on People
