Live July 2018 version
Now everybody, everybody has a love-hate relationship with their hometown. It's just built into the equation of growing up. If you take me, I'm Mr. Born To Run. I'm Mr. Thunder fucking Road. I was born to run, not to stay. My home, New Jersey... it's a death trap. It's a suicide rap. Listen to the lyrics, all right? I gotta get out, I gotta hit the highway, I'm a road running man, I got the white line fever in my veins. I am gonna bring my girl and I have had enough of the shit that this place dishes out. I am gonna run, run, run, and I'm... well I'm never coming back. I currently live ten minutes from my hometown. But uh... "Born To Come Back" or uh... Who would have bought that shit? Nobody. Nobody. Nobody. In our front yard, only a few feet from our porch stood the grandest tree in town. It was a towering, beautiful copper beech tree. And on sunny days, I lived under its branches. Its roots were a fort for my soldiers and a corral for my horses. And I was the first on my block to climb high into its upper reaches, leaving behind a world that... I didn't care for much already. And up near the top I had the wind in my face and I had all the dreaming room that you could want. On slow summer nights, I'd sit beneath its arms with my pals like the cavalry at dusk, just listening and listening for the evening bells of the ice cream man, and my grandmother's voice calling me in to bed. I lived on Randolph Street, with my sister, Virginia, she was a year younger than me, my parents, Adele and Douglas, my grandparents, Fred and Alice, and my trusty dog, Saddle. We lived spitting distance from the Catholic Church, the priest's rectory, the nuns' convent, the St. Rose Of Lima Grammar School, all of it just a football's toss away across a field of wild grass. I literally grew up surrounded by God. Surrounded by God and my relatives. 'Cause we had cousins and aunts and uncles and grandmas and grandpas and great-grandmas and great-grandpas, all of us were jammed into five little houses on two adjoining streets. And when the church bells rang, the whole clan would hustle up the street to stand witness to every wedding and every funeral that arrived like a state occasion in our little neighborhood.
My sister and I we'd pick up the thrown rice from the weddings, pack it away in small brown paper bags and take it home and save it. Then run up the street and throw it at the next wedding, and the next wedding, and the next wedding. We also had front row seats to watch the townsmen in their Sunday suits carry out an endless array of dark wooden boxes to be slipped into the rear of the Freeman's Funeral Home long black Cadillac for the short ride to St. Rose Cemetery hill on the edge of town. And there, all our Catholic neighbors, all the Zerillis, all the McNicholases, all the Springsteens who came before, they patiently waited for us. On Sundays, as my mom tended to our graves, my sister and I we played hide-and-seek amongst the gravestones. I gotcha. Now when it rains in Freehold, when it rains, the moisture in the humid air blankets the whole town with the smell of moist coffee grounds wafting in from the Nescafé plant on the town's eastern edge. Now I don't like coffee, but I loved that smell. It was comforting. It united our town, just like our clanging rug mill, in a common sensory experience. There was a place here. You could hear it, you could smell it. A place where people made lives and where they worked and where they danced and where they enjoyed small pleasures and played baseball and, and suffered pain. Where they had their hearts broke and where they made love, had kids, where they died, and drank themselves drunk on spring nights. And where they did their very best, the best that they could, to hold off the demons, outside and inside, that sought to destroy them, and their homes, their families, and their town. Here we lived in the shadow of the steeple, crookedly blessed in God's good mercy, one and all. In the heart-stopping, pants-dropping, race-rioting, freak-hating, soul-shaking, redneck, love-and-fear-making, heartbreaking town... of Freehold, New Jersey.
I was eight years old and running with a dime in my hand
Into the bus stop to pick up a paper for my old man
I'd sit on his lap in that big old Buick, we'd steer as we drove through town
He'd tousle my hair, say son take a good look around
This is your hometown
Your hometown
Your hometown
In '65 tension was running high at my high school
There was a lot of fights between the black and white, there was nothing you could do
Two cars at a light on a Saturday night, in the back seat there was a gun
Words were passed in a shotgun blast, troubled times had come
To my hometown
Yeah to my hometown
To my hometown
Now Main Street's whitewashed windows and vacant stores
Seems like there ain't nobody wants to come down here no more
They're closing down the rug mill across the railroad tracks
Foreman says these jobs are going boys and they ain't coming back
To your hometown
To your hometown
To your hometown
Last night me and Kate we laid in bed talking about getting out
Packing up our bags, maybe heading south
I'm thirty-five, we've got a boy of our own now
Last night I sat him up behind the wheel, said son take a good look around
This is your hometown
Your hometown
This is your hometown
The above lyrics are for the live July 2018 performance of MY HOMETOWN at Walter Kerr Theatre in New York City, NY, during Springsteen On Broadway. The song was played solo on piano.
This performance of MY HOMETOWN was recorded on 17 or 18 July 2018 during the taping of the Springsteen On Broadway Netflix special. It was released on the Springsteen On Broadway album in 2018.
Springsteen On Broadway was a Bruce Springsteen concert residency held at Walter Kerr Theatre (in 2017-2018) and St. James Theatre (in 2021) in New York City, NY. The show consisted of Springsteen performing five shows a week, Tuesday through Saturday, at the Broadway theatres. The sold-out series of performances began with seven previews starting on 03 Oct 2017 and officially opened on 12 Oct 2017. It was extended three times after its initial eight-week run, running through 15 Dec 2018 and bringing the total number of performances at Walter Kerr Theatre to 238. On 10 Jun 2018, Springsteen received a special Tony Award for his Broadway show. In 2021, an additional limited run was announced, this time held at St. James Theatre instead of Walter Kerr Theatre. This new series of performances opened on 26 Jun 2021 and ran through 04 Sep 2021, bringing the total number of performances at both theatres to 268.
The show featured Springsteen, solo, playing guitar, piano, and harmonica, performing his music, restating incidents from his 2016 autobiography Born To Run, and performing other spoken reminiscences written for the show. His wife, Patti Scialfa, has also appeared at most shows, singing backing vocals on a total of three different songs.
Springsteen On Broadway, a Netflix special directed by Grammy- and Emmy-winning filmmaker Thom Zimny, was filmed during two special invitation-only shows on 17 and 18 Jul 2018. The film launched globally on Netflix on 16 Dec 2018 at 12:01 a.m. Pacific Time, just hours after the final Broadway performance at Walter Kerr Theatre closed. Two days prior, on 14 Dec 2018, Columbia Records released Springsteen On Broadway, an audio album encompassing the full film soundtrack. The audio was mixed by Bob Clearmountain and mastered by Bob Ludwig. The album is available physically as a 2-disc CD set or a 4-disc LP set, as well as digitally.
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List of available versions of MY HOMETOWN on this website:
MY HOMETOWN [Album version]