Neither New York nor Los Angeles, this is where Bruce Springsteen has found his favorite city to live

With an estimated personal fortune of somewhere around $1.2 billion, Bruce Springsteen can afford to pretty much live wherever he likes. The 75-year-old, who is currently on the road with his E Street Band with a string of European dates lined up for next year, has ample experience of a nomadic existence that goes with touring and has also lived on both east and west coasts.

But after a a career spanning almost six decades, The Boss knows where he feels most at home. Born in Long Branch, New Jersey, Springsteen relocated to Los Angeles with his partner Patti Scialfa at the end of the 1980s. He bought a 10,000-square-foot mansion set in a sprawling estate in an exclusive Beverly Hills neighborhood - a place he and Scialfa would call home for the next few years and were their three children were born and raised.

Another reason for moving over the west coast was to be closer to his own family. His parents, Douglas (’Dutch’) and Adele and seven-year-old sister Pamela moved to Belmont, San Mateo in 1969 when he was 20 years old, while he stayed back in Freehold, NJ to pursue his musical career.

Sunny days in NJ

The singer has owned several homes over the years - in 1983, he spent $3 million on a huge, six-bedroom house in Rumson, New Jersey - the ultimate rock star pad, complete with swimming pool and breathtaking views of the Atlantic. A few years later, he spent a similar amount on another property just down the road in Colt’s Neck.

Fairly recently, Springsteen bought a farmhouse in Wellington, Florida - a bolthole where he and his family can retreat to unwind and spend spend quality time together after months on the road with his band.

But out of everywhere he has lived, Springsteen has never forgotten his New Jersey roots - like everywhere else, it’s changed beyond recognition from the early days when he was still starting out as a struggling musician, but it’s the one place he can truly call home.

As he explained this week in an interview with The Sunday Times. “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.”

Rumson is a world away from the bright lights of New York and LA, - two cities which Springsteen says he struggled to fully connect with. “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,” he explained.

He concluded, “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 hometown.”