After reeling from his past success on Darkness on the Edge of Town, The River was Springsteen’s opportunity to move outside his usual wheelhouse, taking a page from Bob Dylan’s Blonde on Blonde and making a record that shows every facet of his personality. Spanning across two discs, Springsteen fans get the most honest version of him on this record, from the stories of euphoric highs to the crushing lows and everything in between.
Kicking off the record, ‘Ties That Bind’ sounds like it’s trying to be that stomping opening track that ‘Thunder Road’ promised, only for Springsteen to talk about being shackled to his old town, never fully finding his way out. Although he might be talking to someone else in this song, it’s hard not to look at some of the lines as a depressing look in the mirror.
However, realising one’s dream isn’t all Springsteen has to talk about. When combing through his love for vintage cars and the crazed women he meets on his travels, Springsteen creates character portraits on songs like ‘Jackson Cage’ and ‘Cadillac Ranch’, where everyone is either free to roam wherever the wind carries them or is continuously pulled back to their worldly commitments.
If there’s one element that covers most of Springsteen’s work, it’s a darkness that comes from a kid who’s seen too much. After being struck down one too many times, Springsteen finds different ways to combat his pitch-black heart, pleading with his lover not to leave him out to dry on ‘Fade Away’ or numbly turning a blind eye to a kid who is left begging in the street on ‘Wreck on the Highway’.
However, Springsteen isn’t alone in telling these tales of rock and roll folklore. Compared to his usual E Street Band setup, some of these tunes belong to Roy Bittan, using both piano and organ to create a haze of emotion around nearly every song. Although Springsteen might be selling a story about everybody looking for love in ‘Hungry Heart’, Bittan’s twinkling piano gives fans the sensation of their heart skipping a beat. Even as the final song ends, all that’s left is Bittan’s piano sustaining a final heartbeat before dying out.
Stevie Van Zandt isn’t too far from Springsteen’s side, either, always answering his need for old-school rock and roll with pseudo-Keith Richards licks. Springsteen is far from just a storyteller on these songs, taking his voice to the brink on belters like ‘I’m A Rocker’, which includes one of the best screams he has ever laid down on a record.
Though Max Weinberg is always there with the song’s element pulse, the band’s beating heart is Clarence Clemons, wearing his saxophone on his sleeve and bringing swirling emotion to every track. Whenever Springsteen calls for help from ‘The Big Man’, the song is taken to a new level like ‘Out in the Street’. While Springsteen may look for a love that feels like heaven; the musical version of the pearly gates comes in Clemons’s sax solo on ‘Drive All Night’.
If there’s one element that runs through every one of Springsteen’s offerings here, it’s heart. Across 20 tracks, Springsteen is trying to find the answer to why we choose to love, and more often than not, walks away with different answers on each song. Although there’s a certain lustful sound on ‘You Can Look (But You Better Not Touch)’, ‘Two Hearts’ and ‘I Wanna Marry You’ return to the childlike innocence of love that creates butterflies in the stomach during one’s teenage years.
Love is certainly not a walk in the park, and the best tunes on the record reflect the sour side of love, both platonic and romantic. On ‘Independence Day’, Springsteen is at his most defeated, talking about his strained relationship with his father. Although the song could easily be about America’s Independence Day, Springsteen imagines the day he finally leaves his father behind at his old house, knowing they were both too dysfunctionally similar to carry on.
The title track might be Springsteen’s most revealing version of the topic, as he tells the story of getting his girlfriend Mary pregnant and buying a union card and a wedding coat on his 18th birthday. The river in the tune might be a callback to the old days when they didn’t have to care about real life, but it could just easily be them wanting to cherish their innocence one last time.
Although the title track doesn’t paint the most optimistic picture for the future, ‘Drive All Night’ is the main epic of the record where everything comes full circle. The tune doesn’t mince words about how fractured the narrator’s relationship has become, but he’s still willing to drive all night just to see his lover’s charms again. As much as the journey might be long and hard to manage, finding that reason to believe at the end of the day makes all the difference.
While Springsteen might have been a bit indulgent throughout the track listing, there isn’t a single moment that feels wasted. Every song feels like listening to tales from old neighbours from his stomping grounds, each with their own unique story that never stops being entertaining for a second. Springsteen always wrote about what he knew, and The River is where he lays all of his emotions in one room and lets them coalesce together to form rock and roll’s beating heart.
Posted from: https://faroutmagazine.co.uk/bruce-springsteen-the-river-album-review/