Bruce Springsteen has written more songs about his father than almost any other subject. The relationship runs through his catalog like a fault line — present in the darkness of Nebraska, in the working-class tension of Born to Run, in the explicit confrontations of Adam Raised a Cain, which is the most direct account of the father-son dynamic Springsteen has ever put on record. Douglas Springsteen was a man who struggled — with depression, with work, with the specific American masculine difficulty of expressing anything that resembled softness toward a son who had chosen a path he didn’t understand and couldn’t validate.
The two men fought throughout Springsteen’s childhood and adolescence in Freehold, New Jersey. Douglas wanted his son to have a trade, a stable job, something comprehensible. Bruce wanted a guitar and wanted out. He got both and spent the next twenty years processing what they had cost him and what his father’s silence had cost them both.
The stories Springsteen tells about his father in concert — and he has told them hundreds of times, in spoken introductions to songs that go on for ten or fifteen minutes of pure narrative storytelling — describe a man who showed love in no language that the young Bruce could receive. Who worked nights and drank and sat in the kitchen in the dark. Who watched his son become famous without ever saying, in any clear way, whether it had changed his assessment.
The night Springsteen has returned to most often in concert introductions happened after a show somewhere in the Midwest in the late 1970s — the Darkness on the Edge of Town period, when Springsteen was becoming the kind of famous that crosses from music into something larger. Douglas Springsteen was in the audience. After the show he came backstage. And he told his son — directly, in words, for perhaps the first time — that he was proud of him.
Springsteen has said he did not know what to do with it. That he had waited so long for exactly that sentence that when it arrived he was not prepared. That it was simultaneously everything he had wanted and somehow not enough to undo everything that had preceded it — which is one of the most honest things he has ever said about his own psychology.
He wrote Independence Day shortly after. The song is addressed to his father — a quiet conversation between a son leaving and a father who has run out of ways to hold him back. “Some day we’ll look back on this and it will all seem funny / But there won’t be no going back.” It is not a triumphant song. It is a song about the specific sadness of getting what you wanted after the moment for it has passed.
Douglas Springsteen died in 1998. Bruce performed Adam Raised a Cain at his funeral — the song that, more than any other, described their conflict in terms that were not softened or resolved. He has said it was the right song to play. His father would have understood the honesty of it, if nothing else.
The night his father said he was proud, Springsteen drove home alone. He has never said exactly what he felt. The songs say it instead.