With his two new albums – his first in nearly five years and first as a declared solo artist – Bruce Springsteen completes an emotional triptych begun in 1987 with Tunnel of Love. On that album, "Tougher Than the Rest" articulates the early Springsteen code on love: Commitment is a triumph of the will. You make a vow, you keep it. But at the center of that album stand three songs – "Tunnel of Love," "Two Faces" and "Brilliant Disguise" – that suggest the virtual impossibility of knowing yourself well enough (let alone another person) to make any vow meaningful forever. To enter the tunnel of love is to take a night journey on which the definitions of your identity
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dissolve and you encounter aspects of yourself that seem profoundly foreign and disturbing. In short,
Tunnel of Love is a study of deception – and more chillingly, self-deception – in matters of the heart.
Human Touch (begun in 1989, completed in early 1991) and Lucky Town (recorded in a two-month burst shortly after Human Touch) describe the effort of building a realistic life after the code has been shattered, in Springsteen's case by an affair and a divorce. Intriguing companion pieces, they're Lose Your Illusion I and II.
Beginning with the pulsing title track, which stands among Springsteen's best work, the fourteen songs on Human Touch explore the movement from disenchanted isolation to a willingness to risk love and its attendant traumas again. At first the moves are tentative, motivated more by loneliness – a need for "a little of that human touch" – than by love's golden promise or, even more remote, the prospect of actual lasting happiness with another human being. Also, as the bluesy "Cross My Heart" makes clear, the certainties of the past ("Once you cross your heart/You ain't ever supposed to lie") are starting to be replaced by a more shaded outlook: "Well you may think the world's black and white/And you're dirty or you're clean/You better watch out you don't slip/Through them spaces in between."
Aptly, the introspective, self-questioning mood of Human Touch shifts near its midpoint with "Roll of the Dice," the most generic-sounding Springsteen rocker – glockenspiel and all – on either of these albums. With renewed energy, even optimism, the singer accepts the emotional dangers of love and his own failings ("I'm a thief in the house of love/And I can't be trusted"), stops fretting and determines to get on with living. The superb "Real World" then offers an inspiringly lucid vision of a love that can sidestep fantasy to take a dignified place in "the real world," and the slamming "All or Nothin' at All," graced by a soaring, catchy chorus, insists on commitment rather than flees it.
After that, however, both "Man's Job" and "Real Man" flirt perilously with soft, contemporary clichés about masculinity ("If I can find the guts
