The Bruce Springsteen Love Songs That Turned His Marriage Struggles Into Rock Classics

When a great rocker experiences heartbreak, we can at least expect some good songs as a result. When the rocker is as good as Bruce Springsteen, we can expect a full-fledged masterpiece. Unfortunately for the Boss but fortunately for fans, he has not been immune to struggles in his own relationships, most famously including his marriage to and subsequent divorce from Julianne Phillips. Their marriage lasted just over four years from 1985 to 1989, longer than many rock star marriages but not nearly the longest marriage in rock 'n' roll, and was evidently intense enough to inspire Springsteen to document his heartache throughout an entire album: "Tunnel of Love."

Many of the songs on the 1987 album were largely a monument to his marital woes and all wrapped up in his feelings on commitment and honesty in general. Casual fans may be familiar with the title track, and perhaps "Brilliant Disguise" and "One Step Up," all of which charted well, but "Tougher Than the Rest" failed to chart and flew relatively under the radar. They deserve revisiting, as together they offer a raw and fascinating look into Springsteen's heart, as well as a how-to manual for turning marriage struggles into rock classics.

Springsteen chose "Brilliant Disguise" as the lead single for "Tunnel of Love," but there are more upbeat songs on the album, like "Tougher Than the Rest," so "Brilliant Disguise" seems like a pointed choice. It is catchy, but the story is one of distrust, deceit, and possibly even cheating, which, if nothing else, does make it a great introduction to what's in store throughout the rest of the album. 

Like much of "Tunnel of Love," the relationship depicted in "Brilliant Disguise" is rocky. The narrator, whom we can safely call Springsteen, sees deception in his spouse's every move and lists a number of potential deceits. Importantly, the song never actually confirms if any were real or just products of Springsteen's insecurities. She might be "Out on the edge of town" at night, and that might be strange, but it's not damning. Regardless, Springsteen blames his own shortcomings, singing "But I just can't see / What a woman like you / Is doing with me," which ultimately leads to his own indiscretions. Ultimately, he resigns himself to offering "Now you play the loving woman / I'll play the faithful man," and given how soon after this song's release his marriage would crumble, "play" may have been the operating word.

Of all the tracks on "Tunnel of Love," "One Step Up" is the bleakest and most bitter. Springsteen may sing "Who's wrong, baby, who's right?" but it's rhetorical; he knows the answer is that both are wrong and makes it clear. The main character and their spouse are both broken beings just wading through the desolate landscape of their lives. Nothing works, and there's neither joy nor hope to be found anywhere. Springsteen writes as if all the color had drained from his world, and it's a feeling to which many who have struggled in their own marriages can relate.

Even in a song as dark as "One Step Up," which features some of Springsteen's most dour lyrics, he's not without his trademark rustic poetry. Lines like "Bird on a wire outside my motel room / But he ain't singin' / Girl in white outside a church in June / But the church bells, they ain't ringing" sound like a countrified Edgar Allen Poe, and the song matches Poe's moroseness. When Springsteen drops the poetry, it's to be as clear as possible about uncomfortable truths. "When I look at myself I don't see / The man I wanted to be" is not an eloquent or insightful line. It's just a painful pill he's forcing himself to swallow. 

The album's title track is an oddity on its own album. Its percussion sounds like it belongs to a Paula Abdul song, and both the effect-laden guitar solo and constant synths scream '80s overproduction. Also unlike many of the other songs, it has a few different sections that vary the chords regularly, making it a bit more complex musically. What "Tunnel of Love" does share with the rest of the album, however, is Springsteen's need to explore what makes marriages tick, and perhaps more accurately, what makes them stop ticking.

The entire song is one metaphor. A couple decides to take a carnival ride together through the "Tunnel of Love," a fun house with its own unique surprises, ups, and downs. It might not be a particularly complicated metaphor, but that doesn't make it any less true to Springsteen's personal life or undoubtedly many who heard it. Despite the breezy '80s sound and playful metaphor, "Tunnel of Love" has a real pathos beneath it.

In the final verse, Springsteen laments that "It ought to be easy, ought to be simple enough / Man meets a woman and they fall in love / But this house is haunted, and the ride gets rough / You've got to learn to live with what you can't rise above." They're some of his best and most succinct lyrics on the album, cutting right to the core of the album's thesis: Springsteen thought he knew what marriage was, but once he was in the "Tunnel," everything changed beneath him.

Though its tightly-wound snare hits and synthesizer prove "Tougher Than the Rest" a product of the '80s, everything else about the song is timeless. It's about as simple as it could be musically, almost exclusively floating between the I, IV, and V chords (the most common and easiest to string together) and with nothing special in its instrumentation or arrangement. But Springsteen uses that simple package to deliver his trademark vulnerability and insight, and it makes the song feel like a classic, even upon first hearing. If there's anything surprising about the song, it's how confident, resilient, and even hopeful about commitment it comes across, despite Springsteen's apparent feelings to the contrary around the time of its writing.

The lines "Maybe your other boyfriends / Couldn't pass the test / Well, if you're rough and ready for love / Honey, I'm tougher than the rest" sum up the song's self-assurance with long-term relationships, and sound strange from a man in the midst of writing one of his most introspective and heart-wrenching albums. It's possible that Springsteen was trying to convince himself that he could endure and turn things around with Phillips or that he meant the song as a rallying cry in order to finally awaken that resolve. Another possibility is that Springsteen wrote this having already anticipated his split with Phillips and vowing to do better next go-round. He certainly did do better next time, as Springsteen and Patti Scialfa married in '91, have remained married ever since, and even duet on the song regularly.