Maybe Bruce Springsteen was much more affected by that “Wreck on the Highway” than we realized.

Opening up more than ever before, Springsteen reveals battles with depression throughout his life in a 16,000-word New Yorker profile hitting the stands this week. It turns out he wasn’t just dancing in the dark; he was doing his fair share of brooding there, and even contemplating suicidal thoughts.

At the height of his stardom in the early ’80s, “he was feeling suicidal,” Dave Marsh, Springsteen’s first biographer as well as longtime confidante, told the New Yorker. “The depression wasn’t shocking, per se. He was on a rocket ride, from nothing to something, and now you are getting your ass kissed day and night. You might start to have some inner conflicts about your real self-worth.”

That isn’t just an acquaintance exaggerating. Even Springsteen’s wife, Patti Scialfa, opened up to writer David Remnick about her husband’s bouts with the blues — and admitted she shared them. She says Bruce’s dark side “didn’t scare me” because “I suffered from depression myself, so I knew what that was about. Clinical depression—I knew what that was about,” Scialfa reiterates. “I felt very akin to him.”

Even the most joyful side of Springsteen’s performances may have had a bleak undercurrent, according to the man himself. He says in the article that, at times, his nearly four-hour shows were driven by “pure fear and self-loathing and self-hatred.” Remnick extrapolates: “He played that long not just to thrill the audience but also to burn himself out. Onstage, he held real life at bay.”

There may have been a silver lining to Springsteen’s depression, though. If you’re wondering why he’s one of the few major rock stars who’s never had a hint of a drug problem, the answer may be here. Remnick says Springsteen told him that he was so afraid of succumbing to “the thread of mental instability that ran through his family… that fear, he says, is why he never did drugs.”