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Bruce Springsteen: Tunnel of Love

 A l b u m   D e t a i l s


Label: Columbia Records
Released: 1987.10.09
Time:
 46:25
Category: Pop/Rock
Producer(s): Bruce Springsteen, Jon Landau, Chuck Plotkin
Rating:
Media type: CD
Web address: www.brucespringsteen.net
Appears with:
Purchase date: 2012
Price in €: 1,00





 S o n g s ,   T r a c k s


[1] Ain't Got You (B.Sprinsteen) - 2:11
[2] Tougher Than the Rest (B.Sprinsteen) - 4:35
[3] All That Heaven Will Allow (B.Sprinsteen) - 2:39
[4] Spare Parts (B.Sprinsteen) - 3:44
[5] Cautious Man (B.Sprinsteen) - 3:58
[6] Walk Like a Man (B.Sprinsteen) - 3:45
[7] Tunnel of Love (B.Sprinsteen) - 5:12
[8] Two Faces (B.Sprinsteen) - 3:03
[9] Brilliant Disguise (B.Sprinsteen) - 4:17
[10] One Step Up (B.Sprinsteen) - 4:22
[11] When You're Alone (B.Sprinsteen) - 3:24
[12] Valentine's Day (B.Sprinsteen) - 5:10

 A r t i s t s ,   P e r s o n n e l


The E Street Band:
Bruce Springsteen - Lead Vocals, Guitar, Bass Guitar, Keyboards, Harmonica, Percussion, Producer
Roy Bittan - Piano on [9], Synthesizers on [7]
Clarence Clemons - Vocals on [11]
Danny Federici - Organ on [2,4,8,9]
Nils Lofgren - Guitar Solo on [7], Vocals on [11]
Patti Scialfa - Vocals on [7,10,11]
Garry Tallent - Bass Guitar on [4]
Max Weinberg - Drums on [3,8,11], Percussion on [2,4,6,7,9]

James Wood - Harmonica on [4]

Jon Landau - Producer
Chuck Plotkin - Producer
Roger Talkov – Engineer
Toby Scott - Engineer
Rob Jacobs - Assistant
Tim Leitner - Assistant
Bob Clearmountain - Mixing
Jay Healy - Mixing Assistant
Mark Mckenna - Mixing Assistant
Bob Ludwig - Mastering
Sandra Choron - Art Direction
Bob Adelman - Photography
Elliot Erwitt - Photography
Annie Leibovitz - Photography

 C o m m e n t s ,   N o t e s


Just as he had followed his 1980 commercial breakthrough The River with the challenging Nebraska, Bruce Springsteen followed the most popular album of his career, Born in the U.S.A., with another low-key, anguished effort, Tunnel of Love. Especially in their sound, several of the songs, "Cautious Man" and "Two Faces," for example, could have fit seamlessly onto Nebraska, though the arrangements overall were not as stripped-down and acoustic as on the earlier album. While Nebraska was filled with songs of economic desperation, however, Tunnel of Love, as its title suggested, was an album of romantic exploration. But the lovers were just as desperate in their way as Nebraska's small-time criminals. In song after song, Springsteen questioned the trust and honesty on both sides in a romantic relationship, specifically a married relationship. Since Springsteen sounded more autobiographical than ever before ("Ain't Got You" referred to his popular success, while "Walk Like a Man" seemed another explicit message to his father), it was hard not to wonder about the state of his own two-and-a-half-year marriage, and it wasn't surprising when that marriage collapsed the following year. Tunnel of Love was not the album that the ten million fans who had bought Born in the U.S.A. as of 1987 were waiting for, and though it topped the charts, sold three million copies, and spawned three Top 40 hits, much of this was on career momentum. Springsteen was as much at a crossroads with his audience as he seemed to be in his work and in his personal life, though this was not immediately apparent.

William Ruhlmann - All Music Guide



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.

Tunnel of Love is precisely the right move for an artist whose enormous success gloriously affirmed the potential of arena rock & roll but exacted a toll on the singer. 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-rate song collection as an aberration.

Initially, in fact, Tunnel of Love sounds not only modest but also playful, giddy and lightweight. "Ain't Got You" is a funny, partially a cappella Bo Diddley-style rocker that jokes about Springsteen's wealth ("I got a pound of caviar sitting home on ice/I got a fancy foreign car that rides like paradise") but expresses yearning for the one thing money can't buy (i.e., "you"). In the next two songs, "Tougher Than the Rest" and "All That Heaven Will Allow," Springsteen is head over heels in love, convinced that the sun will shine as long as he's got the right woman by his side. Those three songs are a light, romantic, lovely beginning, and then it all comes crashing down.

Bobby said he'd pull out Bobby stayed in
Janey had a baby it wasn't any sin
They were set to marry on a summer day
Bobby got scared and he ran away.

The song, "Spare Parts," is a road-house rocker reminiscent of Dylan's "Highway 61 Revisited"; the sound is abrasive and harsh; the story is bleak; and the moral is hard: "Spare parts/And broken hearts/Keep the world turnin' around."

From that point on, times are tough. In "Cautious Man," the main character has "love" tattooed on one hand, "fear" on the other (Springsteen's lift from the film The Night of the Hunter, in which Robert Mitchum played a preacher with "love" and "hate" tattooed on his knuckles). The relationships in "Two Faces," "Brilliant Disguise" and "One Step Up" ("and two steps back") are crumbling as trust gives way to betrayal and recrimination: "Another fight and I slam the door on/Another battle in our dirty little war." In the title song, Springsteen voices a fear that underlies the entire album: "It's easy for two people to lose each other in/This tunnel of love."

But these are not "Baby, you done me wrong" songs. They're not about the outside forces that threaten relationships but about the internal demons that keep people uncertain of love, skeptical that they can ever truly touch another human being. It is an album about loneliness and solitude in the midst of what promised to be bliss. A pivotal moment comes halfway through "Brilliant Disguise," when the singer stops questioning his lover and turns upon himself: "I wanna know if it's you I don't trust/'Cause I damn sure don't trust myself." More than any record since his first, it is an album in which you can hear Springsteen's Catholic upbringing: again and again lovers pray for deliverance, romance is depicted as a manifestation of God's grace, and love brings with it doubt and guilt.

Of course, the religious images and the frequent references to weddings will tempt those who want to think these songs tell us about Springsteen's own recent marriage. But to read Tunnel of Love as a report from the marital front is far too facile and ignores the fact that Springsteen was telling similar stories as far back as Darkness on the Edge of Town, in 1978. Since then, he has written about the promises our country makes to its people and the way it reneges on those promises, about the dreams our land inspires and the things that stifle those dreams and about the glory in simply persevering. On Tunnel of Love, Springsteen is writing about the promises people make to each other and the way they renege on those promises, about the romantic dreams we're brought up with and the internal demons that stifle those dreams. The battleground has moved from the streets to the sheets, but the battle hasn't changed significantly.

And in "Valentine's Day," the last song on the record, Springsteen quietly reaffirms the glory of persevering. In the song, the singer drives a long, lonely highway and thinks about his girl, terrified of losing her and grappling with all the uncertainty that's surfaced throughout the album. Finally, he shrugs aside the doubts and makes a final plea: "So hold me close honey say you're forever mine/And tell me you'll be my lonely valentine." It's a partial return to the touching naiveté of the album's first three songs, but at this point it sounds like deliberate, hard-earned naiveté.

More than any other song, however, it is "Walk Like a Man" — the track that ends side one — that has the feel of outright autobiography. Yet another song about his father — sung from the vantage point of the son's wedding day — it moves to as lovely an arrangement as Springsteen has ever crafted: a steady drumbeat with distant echoes of "Racing in the Street," a gentle wash of synthesizer, a lulling melody. Every incident rings true, and every line seems open, genuine and artless ("So much has happened to me/That I don't understand"). It is perhaps the most compassionate and affecting song Springsteen has written to his father, but at its center is a devastating question that reverberates through the entire album:

I remember ma draggin' me and my sister up the street to the church
Whenever she heard those wedding bells
Well would they ever look so happy again
The handsome groom and his bride
As they stepped into that long black limousine
For their mystery ride?

There's the heart of the album: an uncertain journey down a dangerous, dark highway. The album doesn't make it sound like an easy trip — but then, it's been a long time since Bruce Springsteen has written about free rides of any sort. One of the wonders of Tunnel of Love is that in the end, he convinces us that the mystery ride just might be worth the toll.

Steve Pond - October 3, 1987
RollingStone.com



After several years at the top of the rock world, Springsteen pulled back the reins on Tunnel of Love--a lot, not just a little. Members of the E Street Band played on the album but seldom in full-band arrangements. Then, too, there are the deeply conflicted songs--"Brilliant Disguise," "Two Faces," "Tunnel of Love," "One Step Up"--that may have been written in response to the imminent failure of his first marriage. There's more to the album than divorce-court play-by-play, however. There's also the raw rocker "Spare Parts," the sprightly "All That Heaven Will Allow," and the bold declaration "Tougher Than the Rest." Overall, these are some of his most thoughtful songs and most intimate performances.

Daniel Durchholz - Amazon.com



It was in the autumn of 1987, after a summer soundtracked by Rick Astley and Los Lobos, that I first heard Bruce Springsteen's Tunnel of Love. I was 16 years old and had started sixth-form college and met an avid Springsteen fan whose evangelical zeal persuaded me to give this Bruce character a chance. I quickly become a disciple but Tunnel of Love was not then my favourite Springsteen album. As a teenager thirsting to escape his hometown and fantasising about meeting the girl of my dreams I much preferred the desperate, urgent optimism of Born to Run and the grainy, gritty realism of Darkness on the Edge of Town. What a difference 24 years make: today it's Tunnel of Love that I consider my favourite Springsteen album, and by natural extension, my all-time favourite album.

Tunnel of Love is not Bruce Springsteen's most successful album. It does not throb with youthful passion like Born to Run; it does not attempt to record the state of the nation like Nebraska, The Ghost of Tom Joad and The Rising and it sold a fraction of its predecessor Born in the USA. It is a quiet, often acoustic country-tinged album that has become more important to me the older I have become. Before Tunnel of Love Bruce Springsteen had mostly eschewed writing love songs; his songs were more likely to deal with losing your job than losing your heart. Love, when it appeared, was largely infatuation and painted in the primary colours of youthful yearning. "We'll live with the sadness and I'll love you with all madness in my soul," he sings on the title track of Born to Run. In his early records Springsteen implied that happiness was a girl, a guy and a car; on Tunnel of Love he began to wonder what if the car was heading in the wrong direction. His musical musings appeared to be inspired from personal experience. Springsteen had married actress/model Julianne Phillips in May 1985 after having met her seven months earlier. In the sleeve notes to the record Springsteen writes "Thanks Julie", but listening to the songs it seemed evident all was not well with their marriage; the couple filed for divorce less than a year after the release of the album.
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Listening to Tunnel of Love reminds me of what Bob Dylan said about his 1975 record Blood on the Tracks. "A lot of people tell me they enjoy that album," Dylan said. "It's hard for me to relate to that. You know, people enjoying that type of pain." There is a fair amount of pain in Tunnel of Love – the dull gnawing pain of seeing life stray from the hoped for script. I love how Springsteen's song-writing refuses to trade in certainties; in Cautious Man he sings about a man who "on his right hand (had) tattooed the word love and on his left hand was the word fear/and in which hand he held his fate was never clear". When I first heard the album I was a chronically inexperienced teenager who knew of love only what I gleaned from the songs of Lionel Richie and Foreigner; it was through listening to Tunnel of Love that I first learned that boy meets girl was the beginning and not the end of the story.

Rock music can sound hopelessly naïve as one enters adulthood; songs become vehicles for nostalgic time travel. The genius of Tunnel of Love is that its themes have become more pertinent with time; adulthood is after all a process of accepting the absence of absolute certainty and Tunnel of Love is a record riddled with doubt and the impossibility of truly knowing oneself or those to whom we entrust our love: in the words of Brilliant Disguise: "God have mercy on the man who doubts what he's sure of." I know of no other album that has better captured the messy three dimensional reality of relationships.

In one of the album's finest songs Walk Like a Man Springsteen describes a man preparing to get married. "Would they ever look so happy again the handsome groom and his bride?" he sings "as they stepped into that long black limousine for their mystery ride." It was listening to that song and those lines that last year persuaded my younger sister to change her mind at the last minute and attend my wedding. I have written in the past about the difficulties my wife and I faced when we announced to my family that we were going to get married. My family were opposed to the wedding and were set on not attending. I credit Tunnel of Love for ensuring that my sister and mother attended my wedding and on the day it was Walk like a Man that was playing in the chamber hall of Islington Town Hall as I waited for my future wife to make her entrance. It was fitting that Tunnel of Love found its way into my wedding day: there are not many things from when I was 16 that remain essential and relevant to me today at 40 but that album is both a reminder of my past and a companion for my future. The road to adulthood can be lonely and frightening but I feel less alone and less fearful whenever I hear Tunnel of Love playing in the inky darkness.

Sarfraz Manzoor - 31 August 2011
© 2015 Guardian News and Media



Tunnel of Love is the eighth studio album by Bruce Springsteen released in 1987. In 1989, the album was ranked #25 on Rolling Stone magazine's list of the "100 Best Albums of the Eighties" while in 2003, the same magazine ranked it at #467 on their list of the 500 greatest albums of all time. In 1998, Q magazine readers voted Tunnel of Love the 91st greatest album of all time.

The album is one of Springsteen's least performed set of songs. The New York Times' Jon Pareles wrote that Tunnel of Love "turned inward, pondering love gone wrong. His first marriage, to the actress Julianne Phillips, fell apart; he also decided to part ways with the E Street Band." According to Pareles, most of the album's songs are pop rock paeans or midtempo ballads. "Brilliant Disguise" has been called "a heart wrenching song about never being really able to know someone," and "a song about the doubts and struggles of married life."

Members of the E Street Band were used sparingly on the album; Springsteen recorded most of the parts himself, often with drum machines and synthesizers. Although the album's liner notes list the E Street Band members under that name, Shore Fire Media, Springsteen's public relations firm, does not count it as an E Street Band album and 2002's The Rising was advertised as "his first studio album with the E Street Band since 'Born in the USA'" in 1984.

On the B-sides of vinyl and cassette singles, outtakes like "Lucky Man", "Two for the Road" and a vintage 1979 track, "Roulette" were included. On the mini-album that accompanied the 1988 tour, Springsteen included album cut "Tougher Than The Rest", but included another River outtake, "Be True" a rearranged, acoustic "Born To Run", and the Bob Dylan cover, "Chimes of Freedom".

Commercially the album went triple platinum in the US, with "Brilliant Disguise" being one of his biggest hit singles, peaking at #5 on the Billboard Hot 100, "Tunnel of Love" also making the Top 10, reaching #9, and "One Step Up" just falling short.

The 1988 Springsteen and E Street Band Tunnel of Love Express tour would showcase the album's songs, sometimes in arrangements courtesy of The Miami Horns.

In a contemporary review for Playboy, music critic Robert Christgau wrote that, apart from the humorous opening track and the clichéd track that follows, Tunnel of Love is "convincing, original stuff—it zeroes in on fear of commitment as a pathology and battles it." He particularly praised the album's introspective second half in his consumer guide for The Village Voice, saying that it showed Springsteen's decency and ability for self-examination. Rolling Stone magazine's Steve Pond said that Tunnel of Love is "a varied, modestly scaled, modern-sounding pop album" rather than a rock and roll album and felt that its unromantic tales of love are similar to Springsteen's socially conscious work about broken promises and dreams in America:

    On Tunnel of Love, Springsteen is writing about the promises people make to each other and the way they renege on those promises, about the romantic dreams we're brought up with and the internal demons that stifle those dreams. The battleground has moved from the streets to the sheets, but the battle hasn't changed significantly.

In The Village Voice '​s annual Pazz & Jop critics poll, Tunnel of Love finished second in the voting for the year's best album. Christgau, the poll's creator, named it the third best album of the year in his own list.

Wikipedia.org
 

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