1. Everything that Rises de Sufjan Stevens. El título es una frase de Teilhard de Chardin, pero supongo que a través de FO'C. Habla de elevación espiritual:
2. Revelation, una canción de Shannon Sutton que va contando el argumento del cuento:
Once in the backyard
She was once like me
She was once like me
Twice when I killed them
They were once at peace
They were once like me
Hold to your gun, man
And put off all your peace
Put off all the beast
Paid a full of these, I wait for it
But someone's once like me
She was once like me
I once was better
I put off all my grief
I put off all my grief
So I go to hell, I wait for it
But someone's left me creased
Someone's left me creased
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)]