Questlove on the most honest Bruce Springsteen album: “You don’t get that often”
When rifling through the New Jersey heartland rocker Bruce Springsteen‘s most “honest” album, it’s tempting to pivot to 1982’s haunting folk ballads that score the desolate Nebraska. Written in isolation following a new peak of commercial success in light of 1980’s The River and its accompanying tour, Springsteen retreated to his Colts Neck residency with just a Gibson J-200 acoustic guitar and a bedroom four-track recorder to pen work reconnecting with his blue-collar background.
Informed by serial killers, rural ruination, and an American Dream out of reach for the country’s fringe communities, Nebraska was an audacious riposte to the Reaganite lurch and its puffed-up, cartoon patriotism at odds with the reality on the ground.
However, as an artist and filmmaker, Questlove saw deeper honesty later in his career. Drummer and co-frontman for Philadelphia hip-hop group and Jimmy Fallon house band The Roots, Questlove recalled the impression 1987’s Tunnel of Love had on him as a 16-year-old in the aftermath of his prior monster-selling LP. “I know that for most people, especially bandwagon critics, that album might have been seen as a letdown because it had to follow the massive eclipse of Born in the USA,” he told Rolling Stone in 2018. “But I’ve always felt it got shafted”.
After becoming an MTV sensation in the mid-1980s and reaching stratospheric levels of fame, Springsteen was struck with another bout of inward soul-searching. In the aftermath of his collapsed marriage with actor Julianne Phillips, ‘The Boss’ turned away from the social critique that subverted the Billboard charts toward a highly personal outpouring of the messy residue that comes with a relationship break-down—heartache, pining loss, knotty confusion, and the deep melancholy that strikes the reality not having that special someone in your life.
Such open lyrical dissection demanded an album realised without his trusty E Street band, a trend that wouldn’t officially change till 2002’s The Rising. Tunnel of Love couldn’t open any differently from ‘Born in the USA’s glossy-synth pummel. The title ‘Ain’t Got You’ clearly spells out the record’s fundamental theme, scored by a rock ‘n’ roll Buddy Holly pastiche strumming away in the distant expanse.
Winding through cliche motifs of romance from the album’s title track to ‘Valentine’s Day’, lead single ‘Brilliant Disguise’ proved to be Springsteen’s most stark examination of love’s wounds yet—an unflinching picture of the swelling distance and coldness that grows underneath the mask of marital bliss couples often wear. Shot on a single take for its memorable video, ‘Brilliant Disguise’ would be nominated for five MTV Video Music Awards, including, curiously, ‘Best Editing’.
“It’s his divorce album, and I love breakup records,” Questlove surmised. “Like Marvin Gaye‘s Here, My Dear, or Bill Withers‘ +’Justments, or even Richard and Linda Thompson’s Shoot Out The Lights. On ‘Brilliant Disguise’, Bruce is so open about saying it’s over.”
Concluding, he added: “Most people in the public eye go to great lengths to be private, even in the celebrity-obsessed society we live in. But he’s just like, ‘We gave it our best shot, and it didn’t work’. It’s unresolved. You don’t get that type of honesty and vulnerability from music very often”.
