one included on the Retrospective CD from 2004, which is trimmed down to 3:08 due to its faster speed. Other than that slight speed/pitch variation and an additional 3 seconds or so of fade-out music on the faster version, the two tracks are exactly the same. "It's My Life" was visually premiered on the US television show Hullabaloo in autumn 1965, where the group sang live vocals against canned music on a den-type set that featured attractive young women sticking their heads through holes in the wall, where normally animal heads would be mounted. In Marsh's view, "It's My Life" was one of a wave of songs in 1965, by artists such as the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and Bob Dylan, that ushered in a new role for rock music as a vehicle for common perception and as a force for social consciousness. Writer Craig Werner sees the song as reflecting the desire on the part of both the Animals and their audience to define themselves apart from the community they came from. Writer Dave Thompson includes the song in his book 1000 Songs that Rock Your World, saying simply, "There is no angrier declaration of independence than this." Billboard said of the song that "offbeat lyric and slow driving dance beat proves a top of the chart contender." Cash Box described it as a "twangy, low-down blues-drenched ode all about a real independent type of fella who does just as he pleases." Charts Later versions During the mid-1970s Bruce Springsteen began performing "It's My Life" during his Born to Run tours. It was preceded by the first iteration of Springsteen's spoken narratives – characterized by music writer Robert Hilburn as "painfully intense" – about how he and his father never got along about anything (that would later manifest themselves in introductions to Springsteen's own songs "Independence Day" and "The River"). The tempo of the song itself was greatly slowed down, to the point where it bore little obvious resemblance to the Animals' original, and renditions could easily run over ten minutes overall in duration; lyrics were varied somewhat across almost every performance. A live version of Springsteen's version was released in early 2015 as part of his 'Archives' series. In 1977, The Police used to play a version of "It's My Life" in concert when Henri Padovani was the guitarist and as a four-piece unit with Andy Summers. In