Bruce Springsteen explained the influences for this song in his 1998 book, Songs, "At home, just before recording Nebraska, I was reading Flannery O' Connor. Her stories reminded me of the unknowability of God and contained a dark spirituality that resonated with my own feelings at the time. Film continued to be an influence. I'd recently seen True Confessions and Terence Malick's Badlands. There was a stillness on the surface of those pictures, while underneath lay a world of moral ambiguity and violence"
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I saw her standing on her front lawn ... |
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... just a twirling her baton |
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Midnight in a prison storeroom with leather straps across my chest |
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Charles Starkweather |
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... and Caril Fugate |