In November 1990 at the Shrine Auditorium in LA, a rugged, ripped Bruce Springsteen stood on stage and drawled: “This song is about the price of blind faith and what refusing to give up your illusions extracts from you.”
He then launched into Reason to Believe from his first solo album Nebraska, which tells a series of stories where life plays the cruel villain and shatters the protagonist’s hopes and dreams. There’s the perplexed old man on Highway 31 standing over his dead dog, poking it, “Like if he stood there long enough that dog’d get up and run”.
Then there’s the jilted groom who waits all day for his bride, and “stands alone and watches the river rush on so effortlessly, wonderin’ where can his baby be”. Springsteen then sings: “Still at the end of every hard-earned day people find some reason to believe”.
Springsteen was born into a family where faith prevailed no matter what. As he explains in his autobiography, Born to Run, he was raised by women with Italian blood: the Zerilli sisters, who “screamed, laughed cried and danced their way through life’s best and worst”.
For them, there were always reasons to believe. Bruce explains that for the Zerilli women it was “work, faith, family: this is the Italian credo handed down by mother and her sisters. They live it. They believe it. They believe it even though these very tenets have crushingly let them down.”
Springsteen writes candidly about feeling crushed by life. He has suffered from depression for decades and these episodes of darkness have inspired his most ingenious work.
In his album Tunnel of Love he admits that he has “two faces” and warns his lover “at night I get down on my knees and pray, our love will make that other man go away. But he’ll never say goodbye, two faces have I.” Continue reading
Sources
- Catholic Herald article by Madeleine Teahan, Associate Editor at the Catholic Herald.
- Image: World’s Top Most
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