ABSTRACT
On every date of his 1999–2000 tour with the E Street Band, Bruce Springsteen would adopt a faux-preacher mode and bellow, during his performance of “Light of Day”: “Unlike my competitors, I shall not, I will not promise you life everlasting. But I can promise you life … RIGHT NOW!” Yet it was hardly the first instance in which Springsteen had evoked spirituality and religion in his work. From the pregnant nuns “pleading immaculate conception” in “Lost in the Flood” on his first album, to Mary in “Thunder Road” “praying … for a savior,” to the Exodus references in “The Price You Pay” and other songs, to the soon-to-be-lost child in “Jesus Was an Only Son” from Devils & Dust, Springsteen’s music has consistently displayed the influence of his Catholic upbringing and attendant exposure to Judeo-Christian images and narratives. But while there is no question that spirituality and religion are themes to which Springsteen has returned throughout his career, varying interpretations of his attitude toward these subjects have been advanced by scholarly critics. Kate McCarthy has suggested that “Thunder Road,” for example, tells a story in which one of Springsteen’s recurring images, the automobile, “becomes a metaphor for the rejection of otherworldly religious promises [offered by mainstream Christianity] and the affirmation of the possibility of an alternative, this-worldly redemption” (29). Similarly, she claims that Nebraska’s “Open All Night” “rejects the Christian faith the culture offers, identifying it with an irrelevant, and often oppressive, otherworldly spirituality …” (31).
