Life On The Road Is Excruciatingly Hard
Bob Seger wrote the song inspired on the life on the road and what every musician has to face when they are out there touring. It represents something on the other side of fame, which many of us doesn’t see — these are the two things they feel: loneliness and aggravation.
He wrote the song in ways of how he felt as a musician – and the writing process was unusual, according to him:
“I hardly ever wrote on the road. I was more of a field general, and there wasn’t a lot of time for writing on the road back then. The only two songs that I can think of that I wrote on the road are ‘Night Moves‘ and ‘Turn The Page,’ but those were basically cases of getting an outline of verses over three-hour periods. The songs weren’t totally finished until I had a week or two off the road to really knuckle down on them.”
The lines “Later in the evening when you lie awake in bed with the echo from the amplifiers ringing in your head,” is about his tinnitus, which he suffers from due to exposures to loud volumes caused him to hear ringing in the ears.
Turn the page, means, for a musician, being on the road, driving miles away on a commercial bus, they have to put everything behind themselves and move on while turning the page.