So Bruce Springsteen met a girl, fell in love, got married and made an album of songs about meeting a girl, falling in love and getting married. And if you think it's that cut and dried, you don't know Springsteen. Far from being a series of hymns to cozy domesticity, Tunnel of Love is an unsettled and unsettling collection of hard looks at the perils of commitment. A decade or so ago, Springsteen acquired a reputation for romanticizing his subject matter; on this album he doesn't even romanticize romance.
Born in the U.S.A. sold 12 million copies mostly because it was the best kind of thoughtful, tough, mainstream rock & roll record – but also because it was misinterpreted and oversimplified by listeners looking for slogans rather than ideas. When Springsteen hit the road to support that album, his sound got bigger, his gestures larger, his audience huger. The five-record live set that followed that tour was a suitably oversize way to sum up Bruce Springsteen, the Boss, American Rock Icon.
But where do you go from there? Trying to top Born in the U.S.A. with another collection of rock anthems would have been foolhardy artistically; on the other hand, to react the way Springsteen did after the breakthrough 1980 success of The River – with a homemade record as stark and forbidding as Nebraska – would have turned an inspired gesture into a formula. So Tunnel of Love walks a middle ground. The most intelligently arranged album Springsteen has made, it consists mostly of his own tracks, sparingly overdubbed; he uses the members of the E Street Band when they fit. It's not, as was rumored, a country album, though Springsteen sings it in the colloquial, folkish voice he used on Nebraska, and it's not a rock & roll album, though "Spare Parts" and "Brilliant Disguise" come close to the full-bodied E Street Band sound.
Instead, this is a varied, modestly scaled, modern-sounding pop album; it is a less ambitious work than Born in the U.S.A., but its simpler sound is perfectly suited to the more intimate stories Springsteen is telling. Although you could often hear the sweat on his previous records, this LP came surprisingly quickly and feels effortless and elegant rather than belabored. Crucially, it demystifies Springsteen's often arduous album-making process.
But energy rather than elegance is what sold Born in the U.S.A.; the scaled-down Tunnel of Love is thus a chancier commercial proposition. The songs are the kind that many of the fans at the last tour's stadium shows talked through. Listeners who turn to Springsteen for outsize gestures and roaring radio rock may well be confused or even irritated by these more somber miniatures and may insist on reading a first
The often-overlooked follow-up to Born in the USA finds Springsteen -- struggling in a marriage of two years -- leaving his hot-rod parked outside and instead telling stories from inside the marital home. "Spare Parts" chills the soul; "Valentine's Day" is a mystical gem. Haunting stuff.
