Bruce Springsteen – Further On (Up the Road)

General CommentIf you look at the imagery of the lyrics you get a clear picture of a wander type narrator, in some ways conjuring images of characters from Western movie such as Clint Eastwood’s ‘Man with no Name’ (‘gun is cocked’ ‘miles are marked in the blood and gold’) and Franco Nero’s ‘Django’ (‘dead man’s suit’ ‘graveyard boots’) whilst also suggesting such musical heroes as Antonio Banderas’ ‘El Mariachi’ (‘song to sing’). Without specifically naming or referring to any specific character the lyrics create an image of a stereotypical gunslinger/vagrant in a desert. So on the surface the song could be said to be about a gunslinger confronting his violent and dangerous lifestyle, searching a literal or metaphorical desert as he is driven by the fever in his soul, perhaps aimed at someone specific who is to wait further on ahead for the answer.

However I feel this immediate imagery makes more sense when taken in context of the album, while maybe not about 9/11, certainly seems strongly influenced by the Christian themes of the album. If you see the desert as possibly an allusion to Jesus’ 40 days in the desert, or perhaps a more broad ‘desert of the soul’, a concept backed up by the lines ‘Searching through the dust, looking for a sign… but I got this fever burning in my soul’. In this context the original imagery of a gunslinger/vagrant could be seen as a state of mind, being both an ideal of individuality & self-reliance while also being very violent and morally grey, perhaps representing these qualities in the average person. When this image goes through the desert as an allegory for temptation, self-reflection, or hardship then lines such as ‘If there’s a light up ahead, well brother I don’t know’ ‘let’s take the good times as they go’ & ‘One sunny morning we’ll rise I know’ begin to become as possible allusion for the search for God, morality, or simply the self.

I guess I think this song is about is about putting one’s life on hold, sending it further on up the road to wait for the narrator to find some kind of answer, and holding onto the optimism that things will work out in order to make such self-reflection possible. Just my opinion though ^_^

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