Tunnel of Love (album)

Background

The album is one of Springsteen's least performed set of songs. The New York Times' Jon Pareles wrote that Tunnel of Love "turned inward, pondering love gone wrong. His first marriage, to the actress Julianne Phillips, fell apart; he also decided to part ways with the E Street Band." According to Pareles, most of the album's songs are pop rock paeans or midtempo ballads. "Brilliant Disguise" has been called "a heart wrenching song about never being really able to know someone," and "a song about the doubts and struggles of married life."

On the B-sides of vinyl and cassette singles, outtakes like "Lucky Man", "Two for the Road" and a vintage 1979 track, "Roulette" were included. On the mini-album that accompanied the 1988 tour, Springsteen included album cut "Tougher Than The Rest", but included another River outtake, "Be True" a rearranged, acoustic "Born To Run", and the Bob Dylan cover, "Chimes of Freedom".

Commercially the album went triple platinum in the US, with "Brilliant Disguise" being one of his biggest hit singles, peaking at #5 on the Billboard Hot 100, "Tunnel of Love" also making the Top 10, reaching #9, and "One Step Up" just falling short.

The 1988 Springsteen and E Street Band Tunnel of Love Express tour would showcase the album's songs, sometimes in arrangements courtesy of The Miami Horns.

Music videos

Irish filmmaker Meiert Avis directed the music videos for "Brilliant Disguise", "One Step Up", "Tougher Than the Rest", and "Tunnel of Love". The videos were shot on locations in New Jersey, including Asbury Park. The intensely personal "Brilliant Disguise" video broke new ground on MTV, being a single shot without edits. The video was nominated for four MTV Awards, including Video of the Year and, paradoxically, Best Editing.

Critical reception

In a contemporary review for Playboy, music critic Robert Christgau wrote that, apart from the humorous opening track and the clichéd track that follows, Tunnel of Love is "convincing, original stuff—it zeroes in on fear of commitment as a pathology and battles it." He particularly praised the album's introspective second half in his consumer guide for The Village Voice, saying that it showed Springsteen's decency and ability for self-examination. Rolling Stone magazine's Steve Pond said that Tunnel of Love is "a varied, modestly scaled, modern-sounding pop album" rather than a rock and roll album and felt that its unromantic tales of love are similar to Springsteen's socially conscious work about broken promises and dreams in America:

On Tunnel of Love, Springsteen is writing about the promises people make to each other and the way they renege on those promises, about the romantic dreams we're brought up with and the internal demons that stifle those dreams. The battleground has moved from the streets to the sheets, but the battle hasn't changed significantly.

In The Village Voice's annual Pazz & Jop critics poll, Tunnel of Love finished second in the voting for the year's best album. Christgau, the poll's creator, named it the third best album of the year in his own list. In 1989, the album was ranked #25 on Rolling Stone magazine's list of the "100 Best Albums of the Eighties" while in 2003, the same magazine ranked it at #467 on their list of the 500 greatest albums of all time. In 1998, Q magazine readers voted Tunnel of Love the 91st greatest album of all time.

Writing for America Magazine, Catholic priest and sociologist Andrew Greeley argued that this album exemplifies the American Catholic imagination. In a 2014 article for Grantland, Steven Hyden said Tunnel of Love remained Springsteen's "most underrated record" among fans but in his own opinion Springsteen's best lyrically. "You really shouldn’t be allowed to hear this record until you’ve been married for a few years", Hyden wrote, "though at that point it might strike a little too close to home. If Ingmar Bergman had been born in Freehold and cut his artistic teeth at the Stone Pony, he would’ve made this record in place of Scenes From a Marriage. Totally ’80s production aside ... this album represents the heaviest blues of Springsteen’s career. The songs are about men and women who flirt, have sex, fall in love, get married, get bored, have sex with other people, and wind up stuck in the middle of that dark night from the second disc of The River."

Track listing

All tracks written by Bruce Springsteen.

Unreleased outtakes

With over 80 songs said to have been recorded for the previous album, 19 songs are known to have been recorded for Tunnel of Love with twelve making the album's final cut while "Lucky Man" and "Two For the Road" were released as B-sides and later on the Tracks along with other outtakes such as "The Honeymooners", "The Wish" and "When You Need Me". "Part Man, Part Monkey" was also recorded during these sessions and played live on the Tunnel of Love Express Tour although that version remains unreleased and it would be re-recorded during future album sessions and eventually released. "Walking Through Midnight" is the only other unreleased song which was co-written by Southside Johnny who recorded the song for his own album, 1988's Slow Dance.