Father Songs

Father Songs Bruce’s complicated relationship with his father is examined in many of his songs, and he made it a topic of many of his introductory monologues at concerts, monologues that acquired, Marsh claims, “an almost compulsive character” during the final days of the tour for The River just before he went to the house in Colt’s Neck, New Jersey to record what would become Nebraska (301). The album contains three songs where the narrator mentions his father in the first person: “My Father’s House,” in which Bruce recounts a recurring dream whose theme is the relationship; “Mansion on the Hill,” a complex look and social and political issues, and “Used Cars,” a description of childhood isolation and hopelessness.

Bruce started singing about his relationship with his father with “a mixture of love and hate” early in his career with a cover of the Animals’ 1965 hit, “It’s My Life,” accompanied with a long monologue about his adolescent rage at his father (25). Both Marsh and Guterman notice the perfection of this song for expressing an almost “universal story for what happened between fathers and sons in the Sixties” (Marsh 26), but with “Adam Raised a Cain” Bruce complicated this youthful rage with a sense of helplessness; the narrator realizes that despite his knowledge of his father hopeless life, he cannot escape, either. “But you will inherit the sins, you inherit the flames,” he sings, in a statement of generational frustration.

With the release of The River, we can see a shift in Bruce’s outlook, to a maturing, but still problematic, father-son relationship. “Independence Day,” even though it was written at the time of his previous album Darkness at the Edge of Town, represents “the next chapter in the story” of the character Marsh calls “The Hero” (188). It is a song full of regret for missed opportunities, and a farewell to one’s father that leaves us with the knowledge that there will always be important things left unsaid between father and son, issues unresolved, and “Nothing we can say can change anything now.” “Independence Day” is a song written by a twenty-eight year old man who realizes that his love for his father is broken, and is beginning to realize that it may remain broken forever, with the son “still struggling to resolve the hopelessness of their lives together” (Marsh 300).

“My Father’s House” goes still further in the process of maturation, but it is a process that once again, may never be resolved or completed.. In keeping with the desolate, hopeless tone of Nebraska, the song tells us of a dream that fulfills a wish for security and safety, for resolution, but the narrator realizes when he awakens that that resolution is gone, taken away by time and possibly, death. The narrator, alone, desolate, haunted by his father’s absence, comes to the final realization of isolation and emptiness, and by the end of the song there is no hope for resolution. The song describes the psychological process leading up to a takeoff point, a point that, for many of the characters in Nebraska, goes nowhere but to a senseless, violent death (“State Trooper,” “Nebraska”) or to a hopeless cycle of poverty (“Mansion on the Hill,” “Open All Night”).