Long Walk Home

Probably his best song in years, absolutely brilliant.

Mikromgr is correct. Long Walk Home is a metaphor describing how far the US has moved away from it's ideals of freedom, decency, civil liberties, economic fairness, etc

As Bruce told the New York Times:

“The singer in ‘Long Walk Home,’ his world has changed. The things that he thought he knew, the people who he thought he knew, whose ideals he had something in common with, are like strangers. The world that he knew feels totally alien. I think that’s what’s happened in this country in the past six years.”

Yep, this song is about change. Change happens over time, but sometimes you dont notice it while it's happening... only later on, when you look back to an earlier time and wonder where the time went...

I have aways thought that this song is the coming home song. A reflect or update to some of Bruce's earlier work about getting out, such as Born to Run or Thunder Road (i.e. "I am pulling out of here to win"). In his early days Bruce wanted nothing more than to break away from the life he had back then. But when we get away and we make it, choose a different life or whatever, in the end our home town, our mum our dad is still with us for ever. And as Bruce sings it is that "certain things are set in stone, who we are, what we do and what we wont". I am not from the US. But I am from small town NZ and I grew up listening to Bruce and even quoted some of his songs about getting out on my wall. I did just that, have lived in a number of countries, but now as I am older i appreciate what my home town means.

Actually not quite that either. Bruce is again getting stuff off his chest about our country. Great music though.

He feels we have departed from the core values of America. The attitudes of a lot of people in his home town in Jersay make them seem like "rank strangers" to him. It's going to be a long walk home to the place he feels we belong.

I'm gonna go ahead and say that this song uses the relationship with the girl as a metaphor for the relationship with the country. Bruce is saying that it's a long walk home to finish what was ruined. Something was slipped inside his palm, something that couldn't be said. Unspeakable things have occurred in the country over the years. The line about the flag "Who we are... what we'll do... and what we won't." Bruce is saying that the American people have let things go to the point where we're not who we once were. Absolutely brilliant song. The line about the flag over the courthouse damn near brings tears to my eyes whenever I hear it, such a harsh reality we have to face. Bruce had tears in his eyes while singing this in concert.

i think its a mixture, maybe a man has come back from service to his hometown and its all different, possibly for the worst. Or maybe it could be about america as a whole, im stuck between those to ideas. But in the chorus it says "hey pretty darling dont wait up for", this could mean one of two things. Literally he is telling his girl not to wait for him to come back and to move on in life. Or it could be telling his hometown/America to carry on its journey and not to wait for him to catch up.

The love he once felt and received, be it America, be it his lover, is gone...

wrestlewithjime - hate to break it to you but you're wrong. It's about a guy coming back to the town he grew up in and not recognizing anything, everything being different etc.