"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:
“As long as skies are blue, and fields are green
Evening must usher night, night urge the morrow,
Month follow month with woe, and year wake year to sorrow”
—Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822)
“This melancholy London—I sometimes imagine that the souls of the lost are compelled to walk through its streets perpetually. One feels them passing like a whiff of air.”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)
“Parents offer an open womb. More than anyone else in your life, mothers, and sometimes fathers, can kiss it, and make it well when their grown children need to regress and repair. More than anyone else in your life, mothers, and sometimes fathers, can catch you when you start to fall. When you are in disgrace, defeat, and despair, home may be the safest place to hide.”
—Frank Pittman (20th century)