Bruce Springsteen sobre Flannery

La alerta que tengo actividada de google me envía a una entrada de uno que asistió a un Congreso sobre Springsteen.
Se refiere a una comunicación de Irwin Streight (al que conocí en el Congreso de Roma sobre FO'C), en la que estudia cómo Bruce Springsteen ha sido influido por FO'C, primero a través de Wise Blood (pero de la película de John Huston) y luego directamente por sus libros. Y eso deja una huella clara en los discos más 'folk' de Springsteen: Nebraska, The Ghost of Tom Joad y Devils and Dust.
Aquí os dejo el resumen que aparece entre la información del Congreso:

The Flannery O’Connor of American Rock*

Irwin Streight, Royal Military College of Canada
My paper/presentation explores the influence of American short story writer and novelist Flannery O'Connor on both the form and content of Bruce Springsteen's songwriting. In interviews following the release of Nebraska and Born in the USA, Springsteen widely acknowledged that his vision and craft as a songwriter had been influenced by the art of Flannery O'Connor, first by viewing John Huston's film adaptation of her first novel, Wise Blood, and later through reading her fiction. The darkly redemptive songs on Nebraska owe a debt to O'Connor; and Springsteen both alludes to and quotes from her works in some of the lyrics. In an interview with Will Percy in DoubleTake (1998) Springsteen acknowledges that while writing the songs for this album he was "deep into O'Connor," and recollects in detail how the reading of O'Connor's short fiction,at the urging of his manager Jon Landau, helped him to develop "a more scaled down, more personal, more restrained way of getting [his] ideas across." Like O'Connor, Springsteen recognizes a "meanness" (O'Connor's word) in modern America, often manifest in some form of violence that is symptomatic of a lack of both spiritual and relational grounding.

Springsteen's exploration of this "meanness" in his songs, I will argue, particularly on his trio of "folk" albums‐‐Nebraska, The Ghost of Tom Joad, and Devils and Dust‐‐owes its direction to his reading of O'Connor. Says Springsteen,

"There was something in those stories of hers that I felt captured a certain part of the American character that I was interested in writing about. They were a big, big revelation. She got to the heart of some part of meanness that she never spelled out, because if she spelled it out you wouldn't be getting it. It was always at the core of every one of her stories‐‐the way she left that hole there, that hole that's inside of everybody. There was some dark thing‐‐a component of spirituality‐‐that I sensed in her stories, and that set me off exploring characters of my own." (DoubleTake 37)

*[title quotation from a comment by alt. country artist Toby Burke, in a special Springsteen retrospective edition (Legends #4) of British fanzine Uncut 1.4 (2004)]