Bruce Springsteen is an artist who craves development and variety; he was never going to stick to one specific sound. Over the course of The Boss’ extensive time within the music industry, he has explored countless different musical styles and avenues of songwriting inspiration. It is that variety in his discography, moving from one era to another with effortless grace, which has helped to make the New Jersey native such an enduring figure within American rock music.
For most listeners, Springsteen first arrived on their radar with the release of Born to Run in 1975, an album which is already fairly diverse in its offerings. On the whole, though, the album was released with commercial, mainstream appeal in mind. As a result, much of the material on Born to Run leans towards pop rock, folk, and R&B, largely because those styles were selling well at the time. Although this album broke Springsteen into the mainstream for the first time, its success did not necessarily mean that the songwriter would aim to replicate the album in terms of sound.
In a similar vein, the colossal success of Born in the USA in 1984 marked an incredibly important moment within Springsteen’s career, but it did not define his inherent sound forever. “It was sort of an anomaly,” the songwriter later said of that album’s success. “I knew when I wrote the song ‘Born in the USA’ that it felt powerful, and I knew it would be popular or well received or whatever, but I didn’t expect that particular type of experience”. Nevertheless, the song became one of Springsteen’s biggest and most misunderstood tracks.
“I felt we did a very good job at that particular point in time in trying to remain as focused as I could on what I was doing,” Springsteen continued, “But it wasn’t something I was expecting to do forever or would have wanted to do forever.” Instead, the singer went on to craft a completely separate sonic experience for his next project, largely abandoning the commercially successful sound of ‘Born in the USA’ for something a little more personal.
Closing out that period of his discography, Springsteen opted for a deeply personal, vulnerable record in the form of 1987’s Tunnel of Love. “I recorded Tunnel of Love next and that was my adieu to that whole particular part of my life and my work, and that’s fine,” he explained. “I wouldn’t want to live in that particular place for my whole life. I wouldn’t want to be somebody who has to. Right now, I’m very comfortable.”
The album is an incredibly introspective exploration of Springsteen’s mindset at the time, both with regard to his marriage to Julianne Phillips and his personal struggles, too. Though not quite as gut-wrenchingly personal as an album like Nebraska, Tunnel of Love still marked a significant departure from the pop-potential of his previous work.
Despite this switch-up in sound, Tunnel of Love was still an incredibly successful album for Springsteen, topping the album charts in both the UK and the USA, showing that there was clearly an appetite for Springsteen’s more personal, introspective material. More importantly, though, the record gave the songwriter an opportunity to move away from the sounds of Born in the USA to explore other influences without sacrificing his levels of success or notoriety.
Following on from Tunnel of Love, Springsteen continued to adapt and switch-up his material, exploring a wide variety of sounds and genre conventions, ranging from funk and soul to traditional folk. His seeming inability to stay in one lane, music-wise, has earned him the admiration of millions of fans worldwide, drawn in by his infallible sense of artistry and unshakeable principles.
