Probably the best long-form Springsteen exchange on record has been an interview by Will Percy, nephew of writer Walker Percy. It got deep into song- and identity-craft, far beyond "in some fashion."

Following nicely in that vein was Nick Hornby's recent interview with Springsteen for the Observer, Britain's oldest Sunday paper. Despite the musician's appearance in the writer's High Fidelity and their shared Marah friendship, they hadn't met until the interview and its surrounding events.

The obvious awkwardness seemed to pay off. Reading it last night, one question stood out for me. "Does it feel like young man's music to you now," Hornby asked, "the first three, four records?"

Springsteen responded:

(The paragraph chunkings are mine, for readability.)

I would say that it is, you know, because a lot of young people actually mention those records to me. I remember I was playing over here a while back and I was staring down and there was a kid, he couldn't have been more than 14, 15, he was mouthing every word to us, Greetings From Asbury Park, literally word for word and this kid — forget about it, his parents were the glimmer in somebody's eye [laughs].

In some ways I suppose it is, but also a good song takes years to find itself. When I go back and play 'Thunder Road' or something, I can sing very comfortably from my vantage point because a lot of the music was about a loss of innocence, there's innocence contained in you but there's also innocence in the process of being lost [laughs]. And that was the country at the time I wrote that music. I wrote that music immediately preceding the end of the Vietnam war, when that feeling swept the country.

A part of me was interested in music which contained that innocence, the Spector stuff, a lot of the Fifties and Sixties rock'n'roll, but I myself wasn't one of those people. I realised I wasn't one of my heroes, I was something else and I had to take that into consideration.

So when I wrote that music and incorporated a lot of the things I loved from those particular years, I was also aware that I had to set in place something that acknowledged what had happened to me and everybody else where I lived.

The rest is here, including Hornby footnotes and Tony Blair talking about a "grotty" apartment where he and Cherie used to listen to Bruce.

Big thanks to Shalini for reminding me to post this.

CNN.com's Todd Leopold has a look at Hornby's new book, A Long Way Down. "The book concerns four people who have decided to commit suicide by jumping off the same building on New Year's Eve…." Once they meet, they decide they just can't commit suicide. Not right away, anyway. Suicide is best done in private, and now they all have an audience — of each other. So they start talking."

Hornby is currently touring the States. You can still catch him if you live in California or the Pacific Northwest. Please do because he appeared a few blocks from my apartment last Thursday and I had no idea. He's also been touring with Marah some — a reading and music program — but now they're each onto solo dates.

The Sun-Times has a freelancer's take on the Chicago show, and I like how it gets half a row of my CDs in one sentence. "As for Marah, a gang of Springsteen- and Replacements-worshippers who seem to rank second only to Ryan Adams in terms of most raw talent put to least good use….."

Yeah. For equal time purposes, it's worth noting that the bridge of Can't Hardly Wait, Marah's Replacements cover, inspired a yokel in the crowd to yell, "Fuck Jim DeRogatis!"

According to those who were there, the yokel was met with wild applause.

First thing after going through my e-mail from the past week, I registered this morning for Facebook.

Why? It's complicated. My brother is showing me a couple weeks ago how the Penn kids use the site like I use Parmesan, so it seems worth investigating. Unfortunately, like everyone else who's not in college now (with the exception of a few venture capitalists), I'm kind of over the social networking thing. Put in all your info, collect your friends, reconnect to some extent, and let simmer until cool. How often are you visiting Friendster these days?

So I signed up for Facebook and typed in a few details. But not many. Not worth the effort. I found a few friends and added them, but with the same level of effort. I understood why people in college now used the system like they did. We did the same with our in-school directory searches, like Northwestern's Ph.

But looking in the rear view of alumni status — out in the world these sites meant to tackle and shrink — online social networks proved themselves to me to be a good deal like real social networks. Capturing the whole network was intriguing and surged our Friendster, etc. interests for a while, but it ultimately wasn't worth maintaining. With our online lives developing as parts of our actual lives, real scarcities of time and interest followed. We disparately moved, got jobs and things to do, and no Web site was going to reverse life.

So why did I sign up for Facebook then? To see what it was like. I had no great urge to re-establish ties or learn anyone's favorite books, but the information connections were out there and I felt like checking them. No one, not even me, lost from my visit or from any other visit during the boom and current bust by apathy. If you invested your money, you were a different story. But curiosity again proved itself to be a public good. There was undoubtedly an opportunity cost, but we knew all those costs were already shot to hell on the Internet.

There wasn't much point to this post. But now a good two dozen people have received Facebook e-mails saying I wish to be their Friend in a way they're probably begun to think is a little stale, and I wanted to explain how those e-mails do not fully get across my lack of interest.

Not very far into his 2002 Songbook, Nick Hornby called Nelly Furtado's I'm Like a Bird one of his favorite songs for the sole reason that he liked the song at that moment. I thought of the book after registering and took it out of a drawer.

In the passage, Hornby admitted he would probably get sick of the song in days or weeks, but he counted that possibility among its charms as well. "Maybe disposability is a sign of pop music's maturity," he wrote, "a recognition of its own limitations, rather than the converse." This sentence tempted me to consider disaposability as an asset of maturity in general, but then I thought of truly mature businesses and people and the quality didn't jibe with their lean establishment. Taking Hornby's phrasing more completely, disposability as part of "pop music's maturity" made more sense.

This maturity in the last hundred years has been a fatter and more transient one. There has been a set base, like the learned business and people had, to move forward. But pop music has offered what the Internet now has — a sluicing cover of art, the differing displays of information and connection.

When I dipped into Facebook this morning, the thought I had was to look at the features. The reason didn't seem substantial, but maybe the features were more at fault than the looking.

Slate finds some critics (including his New Yorker replacement) ripping his NYT Marah piece to shreds. The critics' main contention? They think he judges the present too much on the past. I think they're all way off the mark. If they want to take the humanity out of music, that's their problem, not Hornby's.

New York Times op-ed: Nick Hornby has seen the future of rock 'n' roll, and it is Marah. Hornby writes, "There is still a part of me that persists in thinking that rock music, and indeed all art, has an occasional role to play in the increasingly tricky art of making us glad we're alive."

From the 20,000 Streets Under the Sky album dropping in June, Pigeon Heart is also now available from Yep Roc. It's a good morning. Punk with a banjo!

The High Fidelity author thanks the band.

I have no idea who writes What I Deserve, but it's an interesting Weblog and mentions Bruce a lot. The Google search that found the page? "Nick Hornby" "10 tracks" — strange.

What I was searching for was Rock's Back Pages "Nick Hornby on the 10 tracks he couldn't live without" essay. Read it here. The writer of High Fidelity is a Springsteen fan and once backed Marah at the Stone Pony (singing the O'Jays' "Love Train," no less).