Westfall

I think it is taking it all a bit too literally to say that it is specifically about that incident. It's about murder in general and about how as Will Sheff said "I remember my co-workers looking at him and looking at him for the evil on his face. You wanted to see the evil, but it wasn't there." It obviously wasn't about any particular murder, just about those murders that seem completely senseless but are performed by seemingly normal people.

I've only just learnt about this band and this song is a particular favourite of mine. I wanted to play it on my radio show but there has been a serial killer on the loose and I don't think I could get away with playing it so soon after they caught the supposed perputrator. This is a similar situation really and the weirdest thing is that it's happened in my town (Ipswich in England) where that sort of thing isn't heard of. It's been weird.

I came to SongMeanings to figure out the exact words to this line:

"But all of these people making all these faces didn’t seem like my kith and kin."

Makes me think of Meursault from Camus' "The Stranger." That, along with Laurie's murder.

This song reminds me of a Dutch/French film "Spoorloos (The Vanishing)." The antagonist of the film rescues a young girl from drowning and is praised as a hero. To determine whether he was actually as good as everyone seemed to believe he was, he decided to perform the most evil act he could think of to balance out the good deed. So he kidnaps a woman and buries her alive. I guess the parallel between the film and the song then would be the theme that nobody is inherently good or evil, that the people who seem and are capable of the greatest acts are just as capable of the most wicked acts.

Country music was made for singing about murder, and this song is about how we just want to condemn people who do bad things without bothering to think about what may have caused them to do those things.

Or maybe it's just that you never can tell who the bad apple is going to be, take your pick.

I think the idea behind this song is that even oo or normal people are capable of doing really bad things. Because he's not asking for us to feel sorry for him (like he does in "The War Criminal Rises and Speaks," but he just makes himself sound like a normal guy (who happened to kill a girl he didn't know).

I agree with the above statements, although I would object to classifying OR as country. If you ever get a chance to see OR live, do it. Their version of "Westfall" is sped up and rocked out. At the show I attended a mini mosh pit even formed. Try to picture that.

i think its about a guy who killed for no reason at all...just to do it. thats just how things are...you do things to do it...and this guy just happened to do a very bad thing. i love how the song speeds up at the end...its beautiful. 'she ain't comin' back again' i totally love the "lalalalalala" stuff...i never know where to place my "la la's" in my songs...inspiring.

"There were these murder cases in Austin where these two girls were working in a yogart shop and these three college guys went to rob the place and killed and mutilated them. I worked for the state at the time and heard the details they didn't report -- how they cut them open and filled them with frozen yogart. They caught one of the kids that did it, and there he was, on TV, and I remember my co-workers looking at him and looking at him for the evil on his face. You wanted to see the evil, but it wasn't there." - Will Sheff

http://austin.about.com/od/cityservices/p/springsteenr.htm

this is the link to the details of the murder. interestingly, there is no colin kinkaid affiliated with the murders.

absolutely perfect song about a horribly tragic event.

This song is so haunting, but its so great.