Poll: Best Song From Bruce Springsteen's Tunnel Of Love

jesus am -- you're obsessed lately

i know. sorry.

i never thought i'd see the day when alfred told someone else they're obsessed on a tunnel of love thread

is that you dude or just a brilliant disguise

yes that is the only song from this album i can hum

btw this is a great setlist; lots of stuff from HT:

When I saw Springsteen solo in 2005, he played a bunch of songs from this album. (He hardly played any hit singles in the whole concert.) He did "When You're Alone" solo on the piano and...let me look up the set list...

Setlist: Idiot’s Delight/Living Proof**/Devils & Dust/The Ties That Bind/Long Time Comin’/I Wish I Were Blind***/Tougher Than the Rest*/Johnny 99/State Trooper/All I’m Thinkin’ About/Ain’t Got You/Highway Patrolman/Reno/When You’re Alone***/Racing in the Street*/The Rising/Further On (Up the Road)/Jesus Was an Only Son*/This Hard Land/The New Timer#/Matamoros Banks

Encore: Growin’ Up*****/Bobby Jean/The Promised Land/Dream Baby Dream**

yeah that's a great setlist. damn.

Yeah, it is. Love that encore.

word, probably three of the songs i'd most want to hear in an acoustic set all in a row

I remember the first time I heard this album, right after it was released. Bruce Springsteen is a talented enough songwriter to write lyrics that aren't necessarily autobiographical, but I remember distinctly thinking this album could not have been written by a happily married man. I was right.

"One Step Up" is the best. A song about a furnace that's not working, a car that's not working, a marriage that's not working. The last verse slays me:

"There's a girl across the bar
I get the message she's sending
Mmm she ain't lookin' too married
And me, well honey I'm pretending
Last night I dreamed I held you in my arms
The music was never-ending
We danced as the evening sky faded to black
One step up and two steps back...."

IOW, he pretends he's single, hooks up with a girl he meets in a bar that night, and dreams his metaphoric dance was with his wife instead of the random stranger he just met.

Wow.

i mean he's lyrically-on throughout the whole record (no better sad resignation disguised/designed as a love song than "tougher than the rest," and it also feels like he's narrating that song after the end of the relationship, which is killer) but i think "one step up" is sort of next level. "two faces" as well, in terms of being simple and devastating and effectively nightmarish

At night I get down on my knees and pray
Our love will make that other man go away
But he'll never say goodbye
Two faces have I

in "Brilliant Disguise", what's the little tinkling sound that you hear periodically in the background? is it a keyboard riff, something like an arpeggiation? or are they bells, or even just the piano? you can hear it clearly-ish in the "struggling to do everything right" & "gypsy" parts.

layers in layers!

synth program?

yeah maybe, that's why I'm trying to figure out. I want to hear the layers individually so that I can get for sure what the sound is.

er that's what I'm trying to figure out

Every stringed instrument in "Tougher Than the Rest" sounds so immaculate. I want to live inside this song.

i give springsteen so much shit but this album is jaw-dropping imo

every other break-up concept album i've heard sounds so unexamined, so immature in comparison

"Tougher than the Rest" was the highlight of Springsteen on Broadway for me.

Feeling like this is the album that should be getting the Suicide comparisons. I can imagine a lot of these tracks slightly stripped down/distorted with Vega’s croon. Slightly related but I remember a few years back hearing the opening seconds of the title track and briefly mistaking it for something off of the Downward Spiral.

the title track is my #1 bruce jam. i think. sometimes it's "state trooper" but it's usually "tunnel of love."

The lyrics to the title track are just perfect, I do think of them randomly sometimes.

"tunnel of love" is one of my dream cover songs to play
loooooooove it

"Valentine's Day," which is Springsteen on bass and synth, could be a warmer Suicide.

I've been on a kick of walking around after dark listening to side two of this album. I think the title track is still my favorite, with all those spooky background vocals coming at you from all sides. But I'm also realizing how much I love “When You're Alone.”

I can't really explain what I like about it, except that it seems to deepen as I listen to it. The surface of it is so bitter and vengeful and shallow, and then underneath is this wellspring of world-sorrow. There's no turn at the end like in Idiot Wind, there's nothing in the lyrics to shift blame back toward himself*. And yet the more I listen to it, the more the bitterness and the false pity fade away and what's left is just a gorgeous sweeping sadness.

*There's also, interestingly, nothing to suggest that she was wrong to leave him. Even when he's fantasizing about her coming crawling back to him, it's not because she realizes how great he was, it's because life is hard and sometimes stressful things happen that make you romanticize past relationships.

some of the most intricately synth work I've heard from the era

I don't know about intricate, but the synths are definitely integral.

for sure I'd call what he plays on "Valentine's Day" intricate.