Analyse af sangen 'The Promised Land'

The song “the promised land” is about the narrator driving in America with only himself, his money and radio. His expressing having worked quite hard to obtain something that actually doesn’t exist, but now he wants to change his life. In the song he sings “Mister, I ain't a boy, no, I'm a man” (chorus 1, line 13), he wants to do what he wants, instead of what everybody else expects him to do. He is even willing to leave his own town, because the life he is living there doesn’t make him happy, he is feeling weak and it’s painful for him to live that way. The narrator believes that there is way more out there for him, and he has certain faith for the American dream.

The song is buildup of 6 stanzas, where there are 3 chorus that are the same and 4 different stanzas. The tone is very serious and it’s like so much American when you are hearing or reading it. But even though the song is very serious it is also deeply hopeful, and the atmosphere is also very American, when you hear or read it you can almost feel the heat of the America highway and route 50. This song has a lot of symbols, in the stanzas, the promised land, we can compare it with the religious “promised land”, it tells us that he views all the America as a god-gifted gift to a man. The twister that destroys everything faithless can be seen as him cutting everything hopeless out of his life.