Long Time Comin' (Introduction) [Springsteen on Broadway]

I'm gonna add this song to our set tonight.
Alright, this is the final days of Patti's first pregnancy.
And I receive a surprise visit from my father at my home in LA.
Now he'd driven 500 miles unannounced
To knock on my door, that's his style.

So at 11 a.m. we sit Sunday dining room, and we're nursing morning beers, That's his style.
That's my father's breakfast of champions.
When, my dad, never a talkative man, right, blurted out,
You've been very good to us
And I nodded that, that I had, ya know,
and uh, and he says: And I wasn't very good to you
And, the room just, was, stood still.
As to my shock, ya know, the acknowledgeable was being acknowledged if I, if I didn't know better I would've sworn an apology
Of some sort was being made, and it was.
Here in the last days before I was to become a father,
My own father was visiting me Tto warn me of the mistakes that he had made,
And to warn me not to make them with my own children.

To release them from the chain of our sins,
My fathers of mine and our fathers before,
That they may be free, to make their own choices and to live their own lives.
We are ghosts or we are ancestors in our children's lives.
We either lay our mistakes, our burdens upon them,
And we haunt them, or we assist them in laying those old burdens down, And we free them from the chain of our own flawed behavior.
And as ancestors, we walk alongside of them
And we assist them in finding their own way
And some transcendence.

My father, on that day, was petitioning me,
For an ancestral role in my life after being a ghost for a long long time.
He wanted me to write a new end to our relationship,
And he wanted me to be ready
For the new beginning that I was about to experience.
It was the greatest moment in my life with my dad
And it was all that I needed