"Long Walk Home" is a 2006 song written and performed by Bruce Springsteen. It first appeared on his Sessions Band Tour of that year, in folk guise in the European leg of the tour in London for one performance only. Reworked with different and shorter lyrics, it was recorded by Springsteen and the E Street Band as a mid-tempo rocker and released on the 2007 Springsteen album Magic. This song was #8 on Rolling Stone's list of the 100 Best Songs of 2007.
Springsteen had said that it was a song about how he felt in the times of George W. Bush. "In that particular song a guy comes back to his town and recognizes nothing and is recognized by nothing," Springsteen told The New York Times' A. O. Scott. "The singer in 'Long Walk Home,' that's his experience. His world has changed. The things that he thought he knew, the people who he thought he knew, whose ideals he had something in common with, are like strangers. The world that he knew feels totally alien. I think that's what's happened in this country in the past six years."
Although not released as a single, the song was highlighted when a music video was made and released on 25 September 2007, the same day as the video for Magic first single "Radio Nowhere". The video featured real-life scenes from Springsteen's Jersey Shore interpersed with shots of Springsteen at Asbury Park Convention Hall and at Tony's diner on Main Street in Freehold.
Famous quotes containing the words long, walk and/or home:
“Each humblest plant, or weed, as we call it, stands there to express some thought or mood of ours; and yet how long it stands in vain!... Beauty and true wealth are always thus cheap and despised.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“You can make lots of mistakes, but if you give children avenues for creativity and joy, they will have resources to carry them through. For example, if cooking together, reading, listening to music, coloring, participating in sports, or taking a walk in the woods are paired with pleasure and closeness, throughout life doing these things will kindle old feelings of happiness an/or comfort.”
—Charlotte Davis Kasl (20th century)
“Obscurest night involv’d the sky,
Th’ Atlantic billows roar’d,
When such a destin’d wretch as I,
Wash’d headlong from on board,
Of friends, of hope, of all bereft,
His floating home for ever left.”
—William Cowper (1731–1800)