Counting Down Bruce Springsteen: #94, “Valentine’s Day”

The following is an exclusive 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.

Valentine’s Day

Pigeonholing Bruce Springsteen albums is usually an exercise in folly. Like many of the best songwriters, Springsteen often demands a certain thematic unity from his full-length albums. Yet he is too well-rounded a writer to ever deliver something that is so narrow in scope that it would not allow for some contrast and variety.

When you talk about Springsteen’s albums in terms of those that hew the closest to a specific theme, it’s most likely that Tunnel of Love will enter the discussion pretty quick. While the album was actually recorded before his separation and eventual divorce from first wife Julianne Phillips, its focus on the difficulties of maintaining a loving relationship certainly foreshadowed those real-life events.

Yet if you’re going to label Tunnel of Love a “divorce album,” then how can you account for the fact that the final track, a position of great importance on an album in that it is the closing statement to a listening audience, is “Valentine’s Day,” a song about the power that love possesses that can redeem even the most long-gone soul?

The sequencing was a counterintuitive move by Springsteen that works only because it isn’t a drastic departure from everything that precedes it. Had “Valentine’s Day” been as gooey a love song as the title might suggest, the effect would have been too jarring and would have come off as disingenuous.

But it isn’t. It is a realistic depiction of the priority of love in someone’s life. The song in no way mitigates the struggle and toil that it takes to keep two people together when the pressures of the outside world invade and their own inner natures interfere. What it does suggest is that backing down from that struggle and toil is a far bigger mistake than taking it on and coming up short. In other words, the reward far outweighs the risk.

Springsteen plays all the instruments on the track; coming on the heels of the band’s success with Born in the U.S.A., it’s sometimes easy to forget that the follow-up was essentially a solo affair. The track he creates is full of circular patterns that individually repeat and collectively intertwine. As gentle as the music is with its gently strummed acoustic guitars, ambling bass lines, and sighing synthesizers, the arrangement, in conjunction with the repetitive melody, evokes the effect of someone running in place, struggling against the confines of an endless reverie.

There is also a nifty contrast between this lulling music and the urgency displayed in the lyrics. The first verse depicts a man speeding home in his car with a heart pounding practically out of his chest in an attempt to get back to his girl. While this manic drive symbolizes the enormity of the feelings he has for this woman, the sheer desperation of it implies the possibility that she might not be there when he gets back.

In the second verse, the man testifies to his own desire for a family life similar to the one that his friend has cultivated for himself. This domestic bliss enthralls him now far more than any romantic tale of lone wolves: “They say he travels fastest who travels alone/ But tonight I miss my girl mister tonight I miss my home.”

And yet he is still out there on the highway, as lonely as it might be, for reasons he can’t quite explain. This bit of doubt and fear ties into the themes expressed more overtly in some of the darker songs on Tunnel of Love. “What scares me is losin’ you,” he sings, but the moment of truth will be when he decides whether or not he can confront this fear or whether he will run from it and wander so far down that highway that he might not ever return.

Luckily, this character triumphs in the song’s thrilling final lines. Those Springsteen dreams, ever fickle, here play a benevolent role, scaring the protagonist straight by revealing that his deliverance isn’t waiting on some untraveled road. It’s actually right there beside him. He makes his choice: “So hold me close honey say you’re forever mine/ And tell me you’ll be my lonely valentine.”

Maybe that’s not the way you’d expect an album that’s so brutally honest about romantic anguish to end. Yet “Valentine’s Day” works as the closer for Tunnel of Love, and on its own, because of its clear-eyed insistence that love is always worth the pain.