“That was one too many”: The album Bruce Springsteen refused to make
Most seasoned songwriters never have a break in between albums. Even though they can spend time slowly honing their craft every time they walk into the studio, the best artist know that they can sit down with a piece of paper and their guitar whenever the time calls for it and make something that no one had ever heard before. Although some songwriters tend to get put into boxes after a while, Bruce Springsteen was determined not to give fans one type of record during his career.
When looking at The Boss’ career, though, there aren’t often times when he minced his words about what was on his mind. Aside from his wilderness period trying to sound like a cross between Van Morrison and Bob Dylan, some of his greatest work has always been about writing stories about the people that he knew in his hometown, always searching for that sense of escape that every American dreams of.
As soon as he began work on albums like Darkness on the Edge of Town, that sense of hope had started to grow a little dark. After reaching the top of the mountain, he started to think that maybe those dreams that he had dreamt weren’t as glamorous as he had imagined, and that kind of disillusionment also started creeping up at home when he started having fallouts with his other half.
While many songs on Born in the USA may have been about hope and empowerment, Springsteen is as lost as he was at the start of his career listening to him talk about loneliness on ‘Downbound Train’ or striking out with his girlfriend on ‘I’m Goin’ Down’. He could still mask everything with some optimism, but Tunnel of Love was where he had nothing to hide behind anymore.
To use the Dylan analogy, this was Springsteen’s version of Blood on the Tracks, and after years of being indebted to his wife, hearing him speak candidly about the fallout of his marriage was enough to leave him with a few scars. His star hadn’t faded, but by the time he released one-off singles like ‘Streets of Philadelphia’, he couldn’t bring himself to go down that personal road again.
When talking about his plan for an album in the early 1990s, ‘The Boss’ felt that going back into emotional turmoil again was never going to work, saying, “I made one for ‘Streets of Philadelphia’ that I didn’t put out, which I’d like to. It was interesting, it had a lot of little loops and things. A good record, written pretty well…[but] I’d come off Tunnel of Love, and it would have been my fourth record about those things, and I thought that was one too many. I had to break the narrative that I was in.”
If that was too much for Springsteen, then Human Touch and Lucky Town were too much for the fans. As much as Springsteen wanted to speak about something more positive and celebrating life, he forgot that part of his charm was the fact that he could take the basis of a rock and roll song with the saddest story and put a little bit of sunshine into it.
But after a few years in the dark, Springsteen did get his groove back by making music as a form of reporting, turning albums like The Rising into a collective exercise for all of those whose lives were destroyed in the aftermath of 9/11. Everyone appreciated Springsteen for the stories he could tell, but after spending years quoting his own heart, he had stopped making songs for himself and began writing stories about every American.
