Gotta learn to live with what you can't rise above
Continuing my trip back through the 1988 album charts.
24/07/88 : Tunnel Of Love - Bruce Springsteen
Out eighth visit with The Boss and this is one I think I quite like (and nearly bought many times, but never took the plunge) but haven't heard in ages, so I'm looking forward to checking if I actually do.
Yeah - I think this is a good mid point between his upbeat rawk and downbeat blues, with a decent helping of mid-life crisis thrown in for good measure. The songs are well put together and feature decent lyrics which merit several proper listens. I like the singles "Tougher Than The Rest", "Tunnel Of Love" and "Brilliant Disguise", but I particularly like "Spare Parts" although the version here does suffer in comparison with the live version, which I remember hearing first whilst driving the car on a gorgeous summer evening with the concert being played on Radio 1 - and that's absolute peak Springsteen for me.
We're at #10 in the charts this week on his sixth week of a fourteen week run, although this was his second run with the first having been for nineteen weeks with it having peaked at #1 in its debut week - for no obvious reason there was four months between the two runs. The top five this week were Now! 12, Hits 8 (a new entry), Tracy Chapman, Michael Jackson and Kylie with the next highest new entry being Public Enemy at a surprisingly high #8.
Wikipedia tells us this is his eighth album and, interestingly for the general sound, it was pretty much all done by The Boss, although various members of The E Street Band are involved here and there. Bruce's first marriage to Julianne Philips was falling apart during this time and there's an overriding theme of "love gone wrong" and boy did it give the critics a chance to write some nonsense - apparently "it zeroes in on fear of commitment as a pathology and battles it". They definitely loved it though and it's still highly regarded, although apparently it's somewhat underrated by the fans. Commercially, it did very well getting to #1 in Canada, Italy, Norway, Span, Sweden and the US as well as here, selling five million copies globally.
discogs.com tells us you can pick up a decent for a couple of quid but if you want a Japanese promo version (and who doesn't?) then you're going to have to pay £427.68, which I think makes that the most expensive album we've seen this year - imagine what it would cost if Bruce signed it? I think this a very decent album and feel it would benefit from a few more listens - unfortunately I suspect that's not going to happen, but that's down to me rather than Bruce.
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