Rock and roll is about fathers and sons

Doug Springsteen died in 1998, at seventy-three, after years of illness, including a stroke and heart disease. “I was lucky that modern medicine gave him another ten years of life,” Springsteen said. “T-Bone Burnett said that rock and roll is all about ‘Daaaaddy!’ It’s one embarrassing scream of ‘Daaaaddy!’ It’s just fathers and sons, and you’re out there proving something to somebody in the most intense way possible. It’s, like, ‘Hey, I was worth a little more attention than I got! You blew that one, big guy!’ ”

–David Remnick Bruce Springsteen at 62: The New Yorker

Step off the path

Step off the path, and maybe you’d get back and maybe you wouldn’t, but you would be changed. Which sounds like strange and awful until you realise that that’s actually pretty much how it’s always been, and if you think any different, it’s because you’ve never left that little stretch of comfort and gone someplace where what you know gets a bit thin on the ground.

–Nick Harkaway, The Gone-Away World