The 1990s albums Bruce Springsteen fans never wanted: “The public didn’t like it”
Everything that Bruce Springsteen ever did needed to come from the heart before anything else.
Even though he could have easily made a living out of turning in one great heartland rock song after another, he needed to follow his passion and make the kind of songs that he felt he should be making at any given time. A lot of that might have been hard for the rest of the E Street Band to stomach whenever he moved away from their sound, but ‘The Boss’ could always count on his fans to be the real deciding factor whenever he put out one of his records.
Because if there’s one place where the music matters most, it’s in the hands of the audience. If a record is absolutely terrible, it doesn’t take long for fans to come out of the woodwork and let everyone know that it’s terrible, but Springsteen is a little different. He doesn’t have a massive stain in his discography that makes everyone scratch their heads and wonder what the hell he was on, but there are some detours that most people weren’t ready to take on when they first heard them.
Nebraska was already the first sign that Springsteen had a different side to him, he didn’t let everyone see all the time, but whereas that album had Born in the USA to make everything alright with fans, it wasn’t long before Springsteen had the same problem. He wanted to be more honest in his songwriting, and while Tunnel of Love was the sound of him being absolutely torn apart by his failed marriage, the idea of him suddenly making some upbeat pop tunes was downright jarring to hear.
It’s even more jarring when you realise that the records like Human Touch don’t even have any member of the E Street Band accounted for. ‘The Boss’ wasn’t obligated to work with one set of employees for the rest of his life, but when you listen to one of his records that doesn’t have the same wall of sound as he did before, it’s a lot more noticeable when he’s trying to get the same kind of power out of his tunes.
And while Springsteen did bring the E Street Band back to the fold in the late 1990s, he probably knew that the songs that he was writing were a little too happy when he started writing them later in his career. Even when thanking his father at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, he took a few cheap shots at his catalogue, saying, “My dad passed away but what would I conceivably have written without him? If everything had gone great between us, it would have been a disaster. I would have written just happy songs, and it wouldn’t have worked. I tried it in the early 1990s and the public didn’t like it.”
That doesn’t mean that Springsteen is condemned to write sad songs for the rest of his life, though. A lot of the best tunes that he wrote during his career have been upbeat, but when you look at the drama of ‘Born to Run’ or the sheer tenacity of a song like ‘The Rising’, every single one of his tunes is about acknowledging the rough sides of life and realising that you’re going to make it to the other side in one piece.
There are even a few times where Springsteen has refined his pop ear and it actually worked later down the line. Magic is one of the highlights of his post-2000 catalogue, but even when he was making the most energetic tunes of his career, you could still hear him searching for something that he might not ever get when listening to tunes like ‘Radio Nowhere’.
So while Springsteen has claimed to never have worked a day in his life thanks to rock and roll, a lot of what he’s done has always been about trying to capture the kind of melancholy that all of us feel from day to day. It’s not easy to speak for the people all the time, but even though Springsteen reached the top of the charts and the peak of the music world, he sees his role as being someone who believes and upholds the values of the church of rock and roll.
