Bruce Springsteen’s most famous and best-selling album, Born in the USA, is remarkably sandwiched between two works of music that are far less commercial and radio-friendly, 1982’s Nebraska and 1987’s Tunnel of Love. In sound and style, if nothing else, these two could not be more different from Born in the USA. So let’s examine this stunning trio.
In the summer of 1984 Bruce Springsteen released Born in the USA. The album would feature several of his most prominent hits (Dancing in the Dark, Glory Days, I’m on Fire, and the title track) and has sold some 30 million copies. The album helped to make Springsteen a household name and is one of the most recognizable works of the 1980s. It is perhaps fitting that the songs on this bestseller embody the anthemic, arena rock sound that would pack stadiums around the world during the following tour.
It is all the more remarkable to consider it in the context of the albums that precede and succeed it. 1982’s Nebraska is a dark, haunting folk album featuring only Springsteen’s voice, a guitar, and a harmonica. The tracks concern criminals, outlaws, the unemployed and underemployed, what Springsteen saw as the forgotten underbelly of Reagan’s America. It is not a pop album and has no ready-made hits. Springsteen did not tour for the album, perhaps fitting given its themes and sound. Nevertheless, to say it has aged well as it turns forty this fall would be a massive understatement.
Advance to the other side of Born in the USA and we have Springsteen’s highly anticipated follow-up, 1987’s Tunnel of Love. Although Springsteen largely abandons the Woody Guthrie-esque guitar and harmonica vibe of Nebraska, the album still parallels it in many ways. The songs cast aside Born in the USA’s grandeur for soft, somber compositions, led by light digital sounds and Springsteen’s voice. The topics also don’t feel ready for top-40 airplay. Yes, there are love songs here but not the bubble gum variety that dominates the charts. Instead, we get deep, probing reflections on commitment, aging, love, temptation, disillusionment, and heartbreak.
For instance, the two faces of love, “one that laughs and one that cries,” found in Two Faces, offer a stunning depiction of a man wrestling with his loving commitment for his partner and his propensity to damage the relationship. Meanwhile, the opening verse of the wedding song, Walk Like a Man, will send shivers down the spine of anyone who has pondered the mystery and commitment of marriage. And consider these lines from later in the same song, relayed from Springsteen to his father, “Well, now the years have gone and I've grown/From that seed you've sown/But I didn't think there'd be so many steps/I'd have to learn on my own.” Has any popular artist captured in so simple and powerful language what it is like to grow up?
Tunnel of Love is introspective and personal in a way that Nebraska is not. Nevertheless the albums are two sides of the same coin, the strangest sandwich one could imagine when Born in the USA is the crowd-pleasing filling. Writing for The Ringer, Elizabeth Nelson rightly recognizes that Nebraska is “notoriously on any short list of the bleakest LPs ever rendered by a major recording star near the apex of their commercial powers.”
This is part of what makes Springsteen both brilliant and unique. For his Born in the USA follow-up also has to stand as an odd choice. Apparently, his thought process went along the lines of “Let me follow up these fist-pumping, relentlessly catchy sing-along anthems with twelve intensely personal, somber tracks that inspect the challenges and rewards of love and commitment in the late twentieth-century.” If nothing else, these albums deserve admiration for both their inherent brilliance and for Springsteen’s audacity to make them while at the height of his cultural influence.
Of course on further inspection Born in the USA is not as much of an outlier as it seems. Springsteen was working on Nebraska and Born in the USA at the same time and the shared themes strike a powerful chord when one focuses not on the sound but on the lyrics.
The aching desperation of Atlantic City (from Nebraska) is echoed in Downbound Train (from Born in the USA), both songs that feature not just economic hardship but relationships under strain, the first struggling to endure, the second dissolving in divorce. Listen to Atlantic City, “Put your makeup on, fix your hair up pretty, and meet me tonight in Atlantic City” and now Downbound Train, “I got laid off at the lumber yard. Our Love went bad. Times Got hard.”
Both albums are filled with resonant parallels, to the point that one could almost claim Born in the USA is simply Nebraska with a stadium rock sound. The song Highway Patrolman from Nebraska details two brothers, one of whom works as a police officer while his brother, a struggling vet, frequently runs into trouble. But, as the officer sings, “sometimes when it's your brother you look the other way.” Born in the USA, both the album and the song, delve more deeply into the challenges facing Vietnam Vets as they return home. Meanwhile, Nebraska tracks like Used Cars and Mansion on the Hill tackle the hopes, dreams, and resentments of growing up poor.
This is but a glimpse into the strange, unexpected, and at times discordant greatness of this trio of albums. I haven’t even considered his first 1980s album, The River, which was released in 1980 and feels more like the capstone to his 1970s catalogue. But that would require another essay at least. Let me conclude with three cheers for The Boss and his 1982-1987 trilogy of albums. As he says, without offering much explanation or hope, “still, at the end of every hard-earned day people find some reason to believe.”