"Jersey Girl" is a song composed and originally sung by American singer-songwriter Tom Waits from his 1980 album Heartattack and Vine.
'"[1] Waits' recording includes drums, bass, guitar, keyboards, and glockenspiel, in an arrangement that captures the feeling of the seashore by way of "Under the Boardwalk" or "Spanish Harlem".
[3] Springsteen slightly rewrote it to replace a Waits line about "whores on Eighth Avenue" with "the girls out on the avenue", and added a verse about taking "that little brat of yours and drop[ping] her off at your mom's"[4] (This line was originally written for "Party Lights", an out-take from The River, which was not officially released until 2015).
A few weeks later on August 24, Waits joined Springsteen on-stage at the Los Angeles Sports Arena to perform the song together.
[1] The July 9 performance of "Jersey Girl" was also used as the closing track of Springsteen's 1986 box set Live 1975–85, as Springsteen and producer Jon Landau felt it accurately represented the final phase of the loose story arc that connected the songs on the album together.