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The following notes, written by Bruce, are taken from the book "Songs".
Born in the U. S. A. was followed by Live 1975-85, a summary of my live shows with the E Street Band over the preceding ten years. After its release I felt I'd said what I had to say and did what recorded work I could with the band, for the moment.
Trying to keep the kind of success we had with Born in the U. S. A. going would have been a losing game. A glance a rock history would tell you as much. Artists with the ability to engage a mass audience are always involved in an inner debate as to whether it's worth it, whether the rewards compensate for the singlemindedness, energy, and exposure necessary to meet the demands of the crowd. Also, I felt that a large audience is, by nature, transient. If you depend on it too much, it may distort what you do and who you are. It can blind you to the deeper resonances of your work and the importance of your most committed listeners. So I created a series of records that ebbed and flowed. This allowed me to speak to a large audience and then step back with more reflective work. In 1987, with this in mind, I decided to reintroduce myself to my fans as a songwriter.
I set up my recording equipment above my garage in Rumson, New Jersey, and began demoing. I wanted to go back to the intimacy of home recording. I started to write about something I'd never written about in depth before: men and women.
The songs for Tunnel of Love came out of a single place in a short period of time. The songs and the record happened very fast. Most of the recording was done over the course of three weeks. The writing was not painful, and though some thought so, not literally autobiographical. Instead, it uncovered an inner life and unresolved feelings that I carried inside me for a long time. I was thirty-seven years old; I didn't see myself with suitcase in hand, guitar at my side, on the tour bus for the rest of my life. I assumed my audience was moving on, as I was.
The beginnings of Tunnel of Love go back to "Stolen Car" from The River. The song's character, drifting through the night, first confronts the angels and devils that drive him towards his love and keep him from ever reaching her. That character became the main voice of my new record; he embodied the transition my characters made into confronting the more intimate struggles of adult love.
Musically, Tunnel of Love was shaped by my recording process. I cut the songs live to a rhythm track, which provided the stability and the sense of a ticking clock. The passage of time was a subtext of my new stories. My characters were no longer kids. There was the possibility of life passing them by, of the things they needed--love, a home--rushing out the open window of all those cars I'd placed them in.
The center of Tunnel of Love is "Brilliant Disguise." Trust is a fragile thing; it requires allowing others to see as much of ourselves as we have the courage to reveal. But you drop one mask and find another behind it, until you begin to doubt your own feelings about who you are. It's the twin issues of love and identity that form the core of Tunnel of Love.
"Brilliant Disguise," "Two Faces," "One Step Up," "Cautious Man," all tell the story of men whose inner sense of themselves is in doubt. "Tougher Than the Rest," "All That Heaven Will Allow," "Walk Like a Man," "Valentine's Day" have characters struggling toward some tenuous commitment. Knowing that when you make that stand, the clock starts, and you walk not just at your partner's side, but alongside your own mortal self. You name the things beyond you work that will give your life its context and meaning. You promise to be faithful to them. The struggle to uncover who you are and to reach that moment and hold on to it, along with the destructive desire to leave it in ruins, binds together the songs on Tunnel of Love.
For twenty years I'd written about the man on the road. On Tunnel of Love that changed, and my music turned to the hopes and fears of the man in the house.