Bruce Springsteen

This chapter examines the songs and sensibilities of rock icon Bruce Springsteen, who has acknowledged O’Connor’s arc of influence on his artistic vision and practice from songs The River (1980) and Nebraska (1982), his autobiography Born to Run (2016), and through to the Netflix offering of his initial Springsteen onBroadway stage run (Oct. 2017-Dec. 2018). Springsteen’s Catholic upbringing imprinted in him what he calls an “internal landscape,” and his songs, like O’Connor’s stories and novels, are grounded in the concept of Original Sin and the redemptive themes of their shared Catholic outlook. Springsteen acknowledges that O’Connor’s idea of an underlying “meanness” in the human heart and her violent literary means through which religious mystery is encountered have had a shaping influence on his darkly redemptive song stories. He states in an interview that his songwriting was transformed through reading her stories, a shift to more narrative-style songs with small, telling details that reveal character in ways that mirror the art of the short story.