Bruce Springsteen has spoken before about how much attention he paid to the sequencing of his albums, the need for strong statements of purpose on "the four corners"—that is, the first and last song on each side of vinyl. While album openers tend to get the most consideration, Springsteen clearly put every bit as much time into thinking about how to close his records. For his six albums he covered an enormous amount of territory, from rock, soul and jazz to prog, country and folk. They include some of his most popular songs ("Jungleland" and "Darkness on the Edge of Town") as well as rarely-played fan favorites ("New York City Serenade") and critical darlings ("Reason to Believe"). With the closing song off 1984's blockbuster Born in the USA, he added pop with a song that went to #6 on the charts and which, as a result of its mass popularity, may be the most overlooked masterpiece of his first seven album closers.
"My Hometown" has several of the classic Springsteen calling cards: cars, fathers and sons, class consciousness, economic uncertainty and the importance and difficulty of hard work. But the most pervasive sense is one of quiet loss. Opening with a pair of scenes from the narrator's childhood—buying a newspaper for his father, and sitting in his father's lap, steering the car as they drive around—it's perhaps the most positive depiction of fatherhood yet in a Springsteen song, free of the angst and tension in "Adam Raised a Cain" or "Indepence Day."
Of course, that's a relative term, and even here things are far from rosy: the song closes with an identical scene, as the narrator is now the father, driving around town with his own son, allowing him to steer. But it's in the context of conversations the narrator's had with his boss and with his wife, acknowleding that jobs are scarce and getting scarcer as their town slowly dies, and that their best hope for a decent life likely lies elsewhere, meaning he's going to need to abandon the only home he's ever known.
Sandwiched between those two famililal tableaus are another pair of scenes, one the aforementioned work scene, with the boss warning his workers that their jobs are about to be eliminated, and the other a memory of racial tension back in high school. Interestingly, the scene of racial violence is the only time the title is literally sung, as all other times the narrator actually sings "your hometown." While it's clearly because the other times it's someone talking to the narrator—or the narrator speaking to his own son—the effect is to turn what could otherwise have been a strictly personal meditation into something far more universal.
The mirrored scenes that open and close the song are an effective technique, comparing and contrasting the narrator at eight years old with himself at thirty-five. But the most effective bit is the way he sings "your hometown" one and only one time in the last verse, rather than repeating it multiple times as he had previously throughout the song, allowing the song to gently fade out, the music lovely and gentle but, disturbingly—if like parenthood and life itself—ultimately unresolved.
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