Bruce Springsteen on how he really feels about his nickname, The Boss

Bruce Springsteen is apparently not the biggest fan of his famous nickname.

“‘The Boss’, which dogged me my whole life, still does,” he shared on The Hollywood Reporter’s Awards Chatter podcast. “I’ve gotten used to it. I’ve given up and gotten used to it, I suppose.”

Bruce added that he got the name after someone heard his crew calling him that when they got paid.

“‘Hey, boss.’ You know? ‘Are we getting paid this week?’ ‘Sure,'” he recalled. “And then some DJ heard it and started using it on the radio and it, you know, went viral, as they say. And so there it is.”

During the discussion, Springsteen also talked about the history of mental illness in his family.

Springsteen said his childhood had been “difficult,” noting it was “exacerbated by the fact that my father was plagued by mental illness most of his life.”

He said he also had a “pretty good breakdown” when he was 32, explaining, “By the time I came out of Born in the U.S.A., I’d been in two years of analysis.”

“And my family was filled with mental illness, my aunts, my uncles, my pop, and it just was in our blood, so I had to deal with it, too,” he shared. “And thankfully, (his manager) Mr. [Jon] Landau had some experience with it and directed me in to get some help, which I did.”