Bruce Springsteen Songs - Adam Raised a Cain Lyrics

Bruce Springsteen - Adam Raised a Cain

Bruce Springsteen - Adam Raised a Cain Lyrics and Youtube Music Videos

Album: Darkness On The Edge Of Town
Released: 1978

Adam Raised a Cain Lyrics

In the summer that I was baptized
My father held me to his side
As they put me to the water
He said how on that day I cried
We were prisoners of love, a love in chains
He was standin' in the door I was standin' in the rain
With the same hot blood burning in our veins
Adam raised a Cain

All of the old faces
Ask you why you're back
They fit you with position
And the keys to your daddy's Cadillac
In the darkness of your room
Your mother calls you by your true name
You remember the faces, the places, the names
You know it's never over it's relentless as the rain
Adam raised a Cain

In the Bible Cain slew Abel
And East of Eden he was cast
You're born into this life paying
For the sins of somebody else's past
Daddy worked his whole life for nothing but the pain
Now he walks these empty rooms looking for something to blame
You inherit the sins, you inherit the flames
Adam raised a Cain

Lost but not forgotten, from the dark heart of a dream
Adam raised a Cain

Writer/s: BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN
Publisher: DOWNTOWN DLJ SONGS
Lyrics licensed and provided by LyricFind

Adam Raised a Cain Song Chart

The lyrics use biblical images to explain the relationship between a father and son. Cain was Adam and Eve's rebellious son who couldn't measure up to the goodness of his brother Abel. In the book of Genesis, Cain becomes jealous when God prefers Abel's offering to his own. He lures him out into a field and murders him, but he can't hide the act from God, who puts a mark of damnation on his forehead and sentences him to life as a restless wanderer. He can't even hope to be killed, for whoever sees the mark will know they "will suffer vengeance seven times over" if they were to kill him.

Springsteen's song examines Adam's role in raising a son that went down such a crooked path.

Springsteen calls this song "emotionally autobiographical." The bitter, but loving relationship between the father and son is similar to Springsteen's with his dad. Said Springsteen: "Our actual relationship was probably more complicated than how I presented it. Those songs were ways that I spoke to my father at the time, because he didn't speak and we didn't talk very much."

This was used in the movie Baby It's You, directed by John Sayles, who would direct Springsteen's videos for "I'm On Fire" and "Born In The U.S.A."

In the 2010 documentary The Promise: The Making of Darkness on the Edge of Town, sound mixer Chuck Plotkin described Springsteen's instructions for how the jarring assault of this song should sound next to the more melodic tunes on Darkness. Springsteen told Plotkin to think of a movie showing two lovers having a picnic, when the scene suddenly cuts to a dead body. This song, the singer explained, is that body.