Lucky are those who meet someone, fall in love, and live happily ever after without any complications ever entering the picture. Most people must endure a few hiccups on their way to a satisfying romantic relationship. Raw, unvarnished honesty about love and the snags that come with it is the hallmark of Bruce Springsteen’s 1987 album Tunnel Of Love and its hit single “Brilliant Disguise.” Springsteen saved the most telling, devastating couplet of that song for the very end, leaving us on a haunting, unsettling note.
Videos by American Songwriter
‘Love’ Hurts
Bruce Springsteen knew that he had the world’s ear following the massive success of the Born In The U.S.A. album in 1984 and its record-breaking tour. What better time than that to deliver something personal and stark? Tunnel Of Love certainly fits that bill.
Springsteen had written only sporadically about love to that point in his career. The release of Tunnel Of Love came two years after he married actress Julianne Phillips. But instead of happy testaments to love, the album mostly broods and ponders whether love between two people caught up in their own traumas is even possible. (Springsteen and Phillips divorced a year later.)
“Brilliant Disguise” delivers some of the most insistent music on the album while also offering melodic swoops that wouldn’t feel out of place on a Roy Orbison song. It’s an undeniably catchy track, and it became a Top 10 hit. Just don’t go looking to it for positivity. You’ll find only cynicism and mistrust.
“Disguise” Details
“Brilliant Disguise” depicts a situation where two people involved in a love affair seem more interested in getting one over on each other than coming together in harmony. The opening scene puts the duo out on the dance floor. All the narrator can do is wonder what his significant other is saying under her breath.
He stalks her out on the “edge of town,” never a good place to be in a Springsteen song. Everywhere he turns, he believes he sees evidence of her deception. But as the song progresses, we find out that he might be projecting his own inadequacies on the girl. “‘Cause I damn sure don’t trust myself,” he admits.
The first two times the refrains come around, he wonders if he can put any confidence in what’s right in front of him. But instead of trying to talk to her, he decides that turnabout is fair play. In the last refrain, he implies he might don a disguise and dares her to figure it out.
Trust Issues
“Brilliant Disguise” could have ended on that note and been, well, brilliant. But Springsteen then delivers a kind of epilogue, with the image of a cold bed enveloped by darkness. That’s when he unleashes this couplet: “God have mercy on the man/Who doubts what he’s sure of.”
Of course, we know the man to whom he’s referring is the character he’s playing in the song. He deflects to the third person because he doesn’t want to face the fact that he’s in this predicament. And what a snafu it is, where trust becomes an impossibility.
As a songwriting gambit, it’s brilliant, one more gut punch after you’ve already had all the wind taken out of you. And as a statement, it offers little solace. Instead, it injects a cold dose of reality into those expecting the fairy tale.
Photo by Neal Preston
Leave a Reply
Only members can comment. Become a member. Already a member? Log in.