Rocker Bruce Springsteen credits his wife of 25 years for helping him battle depression.
The 66-year-old revealed how wife Patti Scialfa, 63, had been with him during his darkest hours.
In an exclusive interview with Aunstralian TV show Sunday Night the Born To Run legend told how Patti ‘bought a lot of love’ during trying times.
‘She was stable enough and strong enough and she brought a lot of love, you know, so those were very healing things over a long period of time,’ Bruce said, as he promoted his new autobiography, Born To Run.
He added depression was ‘a part of the roots of my music.’
The Glory Days and Streets of Philadelphia hitmaker also revealed he was bullied as a child, but drew on his experience and focused on his music.
He said music helped him when he was younger with his anxiety and was like ‘self-medication. It centred me, gave me a sense of purpose, a sense of identity.
“Whenever I came home from playing, I felt whole.’
He also said he had such a drive in music because he wasn’t as close to his father as he had hoped.
Bruce is releasing his book at the end of the month.
In it, he explored his history with the mental illness and his father’s fight against it.
Speaking to Vanity Fair he told of his fears of falling victim to depression in the same way his father, Douglas, did before him.
‘You don’t know the illness’s parameters,’ he told the magazine’s October issue.
‘Can I get sick enough to where I become a lot more like my father than I thought I might?’
He also detailed his troubled relationship with his father, who was unable to tell his son he loved him despite their relationship recovering prior to his death in 1998.
‘I was crushed between sixty and sixty-two, good for a year and out again from sixty-three to sixty-four,’ the 66-year-old writes in his tell-all.
‘Not a good record.’
He added about wife Patti: ‘Patti will observe a freight train bearing down, loaded with nitroglycerin and running quickly out of track… she gets me to the doctors and says, “This man needs a pill”,’ he wrote.
Bruce – who has the nickname The Boss – hails from New Jersey and has won awards including Grammys over his successful career.
His marriage to Patti is his second marriage, having previously been married to Julianne Phillips from 1985-1989.
He and wife Patti have three children, Evan, 25, Jessica, 24, and Sam, 22.