I was 17 the year Tunnel of Love was released; Bruce Springsteen was 38 and intent on ruminating, on taking stock, on running down a list of decisions and regrets, looking backward and around himself, because he was unable to see the way forward. I missed that then. To me, the album was just good; I simply didn’t know enough to recognize the pain and confusion that was quite real, quite apparent, had I known what to look for. Everything, it seems, was fair game, fodder for the music—his marriage, his sense of self-worth, his confidence in his ability to get even one thing right. What comes off the groove is not quite an emotional breakdown, but the tears are not far from the edge of his eyelids as he unloads some of the most trenchant, inward-looking lyrics he’d ever write, in a voice that is by turns soft/yearning and brash/cocky, set to music made almost entirely on his own. Tunnel of Love is an album-length meditation on the possibilities of love, as well as its limitations.
It is a truth universally acknowledged that Tunnel of Love is one of those things that make more and more sense as you get older. Like mortgages or whiskey.
Read more of Rob Smith’s brilliant reappraisal of the album at Popdose.
Sarfraz Manzoor - My favourite album: Tunnel of Love by Bruce Springsteen | Music | guardian.co.uk
Listening to Tunnel of Love reminds me of what Bob Dylan said about his 1975 record Blood on the Tracks. “A lot of people tell me they enjoy that album,” Dylan said. “It’s hard for me to relate to that. You know, people enjoying that type of pain.” There is a fair amount of pain in Tunnel of Love – the dull gnawing pain of seeing life stray from the hoped for script. I love how Springsteen’s song-writing refuses to trade in certainties; in Cautious Man he sings about a man who “on his right hand (had) tattooed the word love and on his left hand was the word fear/and in which hand he held his fate was never clear”. When I first heard the album I was a chronically inexperienced teenager who knew of love only what I gleaned from the songs of Lionel Richie and Foreigner; it was through listening to Tunnel of Love that I first learned that boy meets girl was the beginning and not the end of the story.Rock music can sound hopelessly naïve as one enters adulthood; songs become vehicles for nostalgic time travel. The genius of Tunnel of Love is that its themes have become more pertinent with time; adulthood is after all a process of accepting the absence of absolute certainty and Tunnel of Love is a record riddled with doubt and the impossibility of truly knowing oneself or those to whom we entrust our love: in the words of Brilliant Disguise: “God have mercy on the man who doubts what he’s sure of.” I know of no other album that has better captured the messy three dimensional reality of relationships.
Bruce Springsteen: Valentine’s Day
(Solo acoustic on piano 31-7-05) (audio only - via TWallie)
Happy Valentine’s Day, our wonderful followers.
We love you all. Take good care of each other today and spread the love.
Yours,
Fuck Yeah! The Boss
xoxoxo
(Source: youtube.com)
Ah, my childhood…summer of ‘88. Mom watched MTV all the time and LOVED this vid. Great memories.
Camera Obscura cover “Tougher Than The Rest”
(via blizzards-of-tweed)
Bruce Springsteen, Valentine’s Day
from Tunnel of Love (1987)
