Word: springsteen
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...doubt, all of the five million or so people who wanted to buy Bruce Springsteen's new album, Tunnel of Love, have already done so and formulated their own opinions about it. I don't need to add mine, especially since anything I could say about this lush, polished and beautiful album would only add to the mania. I don't want to encourage a new plucking of parvenus to roll onto the Springsteen juggernaut, a movement that in the last few years has already picked up every eight-year-old and his grandmother...
...that this album is good--real good. Even great. Great in a peaceful, easy way. Not in the blockbuster, gangbuster, rootin'-tootin', anthemic terms of Born In The U.S.A, terms that defy even the terms that I've just used. That album was larger than life, larger than Springsteen, and therefore it made Springsteen larger than himself...
...settings are recognizable too (weddings, dances, late-night bars and lonely roads), but Springsteen tilts them so that familiar territory can suddenly seem like a forbidding landscape. Love hurts, love haunts, love heals in these songs. The title cut suggests an amusement-park romp but ends with the kind of lyric reflection that is perfectly plainspoken and impossible to shake: "The house is haunted and the ride gets rough/ And you've got to learn to live with what you can't rise above/ If you want to ride on down in through this tunnel of love." Raymond Carver, take...
...large cast of characters -- from the wronged women to the wrung-out Saturday-night cowboys; from the rich men to hardworking Bill Horton of Cautious Man, who has the words LOVE and FEAR tattooed, Night of the Hunter-style, on his hands -- can learn to live with because Springsteen can center the dignity in all their lives. It's his name on the album and on the writing credits, but now he seems to be singing their songs...
...Boss is back. Tunnel of Love, Bruce Springsteen' s first album of new songs since Born in the U. S. A., is spare, strong and scary...