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.
I have a pretty good working knowledge of all of Bruce Springsteen’s albums, even the ones I don’t own, but 1980’s The River has always been a mystery to me. And reading up on it for today’s blog entry, I’m fascinated by what I’m missing.
The River is a double album that continues the working-class blues theme of Springsteen’s earlier work but pairs it up lighter fare more in the pop vein. Musically, those styles are joined with more somber tracks that nod toward his next album, Nebraska.
Bruce Springsteen’s fourth album, 1978’s Darkness on the Edge of Town, was released three years after Born to Run, a period during which Springsteen was kept out of the studio due to a legal skirmish with his former manager.
Rather than capitalizing on his new-found fame by cutting a crowd-pleasing album, Springsteen decided to go darker (literally). Darkness on the Edge of Town follows the same sort of street smart characters as his early work but they are more often tragic than triumphant. These people might be born to run, but the circumstances of their lives have them cemented in place.
Meet Me In Montauk 