When he was bigger than anybody else in the rock-n-roll universe, as big as he would ever get, Bruce Springsteen once again defied expectations, this time by putting out his most personal and introspective album yet.
1987’s Tunnel of Love, released three years after Born in the U.S.A., was the first Springsteen album that felt like autobiography. And the personal matter he explored happened to be the dissolving of his brief marriage to model/actress Julianne Phillips.
Two years after his bleakest, most low-key album, Bruce Springsteen released a great big shiny pop masterpiece. 1983’s Born in the U.S.A. was written and recorded with mass popularity in mind and that’s exactly what it achieved.
The album generated a record-tying seven top ten singles and ultimately went 15X Platinum. It turned Springsteen into a household name. And it did all of that without compromising his worldview, even if some of the songs were misunderstood (see Ronald Reagan’s use of the title track for an ironic example).
The songs of Bruce Springsteen had grown steadily darker over the albums Darkness on the Edge of Town and The River, but with the release of his sixth album he mined his bleakest territory yet.
1983’s Nebraska is as desolate and stark as the landscape pictured on its black-and-white cover. Its songs tell the tales of killers and thieves, men and women whose hope for redemption is fading like the eerie glow of a dying sunset.
Paul Simon’s Hearts and Bones carries a lot of baggage but I wasn’t aware of any of it when I first heard the album. I didn’t know it was a Simon & Garfunkel reunion album gone bad, or that it was a critical and commercial flop that seemed to derail Simon’s solo career.
My first exposure to the songs on this album came during a concert in the early 90s. I was familiar with everything Simon played that night except for two gorgeous, musically ambitious ballads — one called ‘Hearts and Bones’ and one called ‘Train in the Distance.’
Following the success of their Central Park reunion show, Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel embarked on a world tour in 1982 and ’83. Riding the high of those performances, the duo headed back into the studio to record their first album together in 13 years.
The record had a working title of ‘Think Too Much,’ named after a pair of songs in its track list.
