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The following notes, written by Bruce, are taken from the book "Songs".
"The Ghost of Tom Joad" was among the songs I wrote for the E Street Band to complete the Greatest Hits album. It started out as a rock song. But it didn't feel right, so I set it aside. I returned to it some months later, while still unsure of what I wanted to work on next. After working with the band in New York, I went back to California and started recording at home. I had "Straight Time," "Highway 29," and "The Ghost of Tom Joad." I also had a notebook filled with unfinished song ideas.
I began recording with just myself and my acoustic guitar. When I felt I had some workable material, I put together a small, five-piece group. Once I cut "Tom Joad," I had a feeling for the record I wanted to make. It was an acoustic album where I picked up elements of the themes I had worked on in the past and set the stories in the mid-'90's.
As with Nebraska, on "Tom Joad" and the songs that followed, the music was minimal; the melodies were uncomplicated, yet played an important role in the storytelling process. The simplicity and plainness, the austere rhythms defined who these characters were and how they expressed themselves.
The precision of the storytelling in these types of songs is very important. The correct detail can speak volumes about who your character is, while the wrong one can shred the credibility of your story. When you get the music and lyrics right in these songs, your voice disappears into the voices of those you've chosen to write about. Basically, I find the characters and listen to them. That always leads to a series of questions about their behavior: What would they do? What would they never do? You try to locate the rhythm of their speech and the nature of their expression.
On Tom Joad one song led to another. The ex-con of "Straight Time" became the shoe salesman of "Highway 29." The unemployed steelworker of "Youngstown" left the Monongahela Valley and became "The New Timer." These last two songs, along with "The Ghost of Tom Joad," chronicled the increasing economic division of the '80s and '90s and the hard times and consequences for many of the people whose work and sacrifice helped build the country we live in.
A lot of the songs on The Ghost of Tom Joad have settings in the Southwest. I'd been through the Central Valley many times on the way to visiting my parents. I'd often stop and spend some time in the small farm towns off the interstate. But it still took a good amount of research to get the details of the region correct. I traced the stories out slowly and carefully. I thought hard about who these people were and the choices they were presented with.
In California there was a sense of a new country being formed on the edge of the old. But the old stories of race and exclusion continued to be played out. I tried to catch a small piece of this on the songs I wrote for Tom Joad. "Sinaloa Cowboys," "The Line," "Balboa Park," and "Across the Border" were songs that traced the lineage of my earlier characters to the Mexican migrant experience in the New West. These songs completed a circle, bringing me back to 1978 and the inspiration I'd gotten from Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath. Their skin was darker and their language had changed, but these were people trapped by the same brutal circumstances.
By the end of Tom Joad, I'd written about the death and personal destruction that accompany the lives of many of the people who inspired these songs. I was working on "Galveston Bay," a song that originally had a more violent ending. But it began to feel false. If I was going to find some small window of light, I had to do it with this man in this song.
I had already written "Across the Border," a song that was like a prayer or dream you have the night before you're going to take a dangerous journey. The singer seeks a home where his love will be rewarded, his faith restored, where a tenuous peace and hope may exist. With "Galveston Bay" I had to make these ideas feel attainable. The song asks the question, Is the most political act an individual one, something that happens in the dark, in the quiet, when someone makes a particular decision that affects his immediate world? I wanted a character who is driven to do the wrong thing, but does not. He instinctively refuses to add to the violence in the world around him. With great difficulty and against his own grain he transcends his circumstances. He finds the strength and grace to save himself and the part of the world he touches.
The album ends with "My Best Was Never Good Enough," which was inspired by the cliche-popping sheriff in noir writer Jim Thompson's book The Killer Inside Me. It was my parting joke and shot at the way pop culture trivializes complicated moral issues, how the nightly news "sound bytes" and packages life to strip away the dignity of human events.
I knew that The Ghost of Tom Joad wouldn't attract my largest audience. But I was sure the songs on it added up to a reaffirmation of the best of what I could do. The record was something new, but it was also a reference point to the things I tried to stand for and be about as a songwriter.