Steven Van Zandt feels he 'did the wrong thing by leaving' E Street

Speaking about his memoir with Consequence, Steven Van Zandt admitted that leaving E Street always felt like a bad decision to him.

While Steven Van Zandt has been back in the running with Bruce Springsteen and the E Street band since 1999, avid fans will know that he actually branched out on his own in the 80s. At the time, Van Zandt felt his contributions were not being credited appropriately, which led to a disagreement between him and Springsteen.

In the years that followed, Van Zandt took on memorable roles in The Sopranos and Lilyhammer, forging an identity of his own, but – in his own words – he still felt like something was missing. In a new interview about his memoir with Consequence, Van Zandt opened up about how leaving E Street never felt right to him.

“I’ve always had very, very strong feelings of feeling that I did the wrong thing by leaving. That’s 15 years of work; I just threw it away.” he told Consequence.

“You do these solo records, you become an artist, you do The Sopranos, you do Lilyhammer, you get [Nelson] Mandela out of jail…I considered the ‘90s a completely lost decade until, when you start to go through day by day, month by month, I was doing quite a lot of things in the ‘90s.” he said, before adding that despite his schedule, he felt like he didn’t have a purpose.

“I wasn’t really conscious of how many things I’d done because it was the first time in my life I didn’t have a real purpose. I didn’t have an overall goal. I was kind of untethered at that point. Whoever asked me to do something, I would do it, but for the first time in my life I didn’t have a plan. So you go from event to event, interest to interest, and you’re not really conscious of it.” he said.

Luckily, he’s back now – and hoping to tour with Springsteen soon. In an interview with Rolling Stone last year, Van Zandt commented on his friendship of years with Springsteen saying that they were “the only two guys that considered rock and roll to be everything, and that was a weird way to be back then, ’cause it wasn’t a legitimate business yet.”