The following is an excerpt from Counting Down Bruce Springsteen: His 100 Finest Songs, a new book available now from American Songwriter contributor Jim Beviglia. We’ll be offering a sampling of song entries — one out of each batch of 10 — over the next few weeks. Purchase the book here.
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For whatever faults 1992’s “Other Band” album Human Touch might have had, it did include one of the finest love-gone-wrong ballads Bruce Springsteen has ever produced. This is not to compare “I Wish I Were Blind” to some of the darker meditations on crumbling trust and growing disillusionment that made up the core of Tunnel of Love. The song doesn’t go that deep into the psyche, nor does it attempt to do so.
“I Wish I Were Blind” is best appreciated as one of a long, long line of songs devoted to replaying the awful emotions that go along with seeing your old love with someone new. The reasons why it all fell apart are not the concern of this particular track. All it wants to do is wallow, allowing the listener to hop on board if he or she is in the same boat or ever has been in the past. And haven’t we all been in that boat at some point?
It’s a bit of a change of pace for Springsteen to write in this way, without delving into the whys and wherefores of the situation. Yet pulling off a song like “I Wish I Were Blind” is no less difficult than writing more in-depth excavations of relationship squabbles and broken love affairs. That’s because there is a long tradition of great weepers throughout rock and pop history, so it’s a daunting group to try and join.
In that way, “I Wish I Were Blind” might be the closest that Springsteen has ever come to mimicking Roy Orbison. There have been many songs — a few of these we’ve already tackled in this countdown with one or two left to come — where Springsteen used the musical template of Orbison, the soaring melodies, the stately pace, the timpani, as a foundation. But never before had he tried to tap into that well of deep, deep sorrow to which Orbison pretty much owned the deed throughout his career.
Think in terms of songs like “Crying,” “It’s Over,” or “Running Scared” and you can get on the wavelength of what Springsteen is trying to accomplish with “I Wish I Were Blind.” The trick to it is finding a different way to communicate what it feels like in that woeful situation without unconsciously repeating something that Orbison or any other songwriter has said before.
Springsteen’s approach is to point out the disorienting contrast someone in that situation experiences between the benign feelings brought about by viewing the wondrous world around him and the total torment that occurs when he sees his ex out on the town with his replacement for her affections. As he said about the song in a 1992 interview with Q magazine, “It’s about that sinking feeling. There’s a world of love, a world of beauty, a world of fear, and a world of loss and they are the same world and that person is wending his way through that maze and at that moment he’s very much in touch with both of those things” (172).
Springsteen’s achievement with “I Wish I Were Blind” is the way he translates the accurate but clinical observation from the quote above into lyrics that can be sung and appreciated by the heartbroken everywhere. It helps that he gets Bobby Hatfield of the Righteous Brothers to help him out on backing vocals. Who better to assist on a song of torturous longing than the man who showed the world how it’s done with his performance on “Unchained Melody?”
The narrator can still appreciate the natural beauty of the trees and birds and stars, the stuff of love songs since someone first put words to music. He even still finds himself agape at the way his former love’s hair shines in the sun. But his eyes are his enemy when a certain sight comes into focus: “I wish I were blind / When I see you with your man.”
That’s when the contradictions of the above quote start to become painfully clear to this guy. “Oh these eyes that once filled me with your beauty / Now fill me with pain,” he laments. Soon the good things are blotted out by the bad: “And the light that once entered here is banished from me / And this darkness is all baby that my heart sees.”
Springsteen gets in a howling, elongated guitar solo that conjures every last morsel of pain pulsating within his protagonist. The harmonies with Hatfield are lovely in the saddest possible way. Everything really comes together on this track, one which, if Springsteen had to do it all over again, he might have pushed as a single since it is radio perfection.
In any case, “I Wish I Were Blind” is one of the most underrated songs in Springsteen’s canon, perhaps because it is unknown by casual fans. That’s too bad because any song that can stand with the best of Roy Orbison in the department of heartbreak dissertations deserves the widest possible audience.
