Such is the strength of its finality, it is perfectly clear that the closing track from 1980’s epic “The River” album was also the last written for it. A powerfully haunting, economical, country-esque arrangement, it is nonetheless musically vibrant, between those gold-kissed strums, spare, warm basslines, devastatingly placed keys and rushes of watercolour organ. The main gravitational pull is Springsteen’s simple but crushing vocal melody, looping immersively to describe coming across an unfortunate young fella downed by late-night road carnage.
Nobody has deployed automobile-based metaphor as often or as superbly as The Boss, and he does so in his sleep here (almost literally, if we go by the lyrical denouement). If we are to take the song as an allegory for the death throes of the
American Dream, at a time when the Reaganite-Thatcherite axis was still just powering up, then we can glimpse Springsteen as a prophet as much as the legendary chronicler he undoubtedly is. The man’s work is always imbued with an overwhelming sense of loss, with this cut anticipating the fatalism of the follow-up album “Nebraska”, or the closing piece of “Born In The USA”, the equally affecting “My Hometown”, which also employs a familial-flavoured fake-out for a finale.
In his finest fashion though, Bruce really leaves little doubt that this is a human story after all. Pop music in the years since has rarely had room for a moment as potently empathetic as this:
“I thought of a girlfriend or a young wife/And a state trooper knocking in the middle of the night/To say ‘your baby died in a wreck on the highway’”.
After that, the (non-)false climax arrives:
“Sometimes I sit up in the darkness/And I watch my baby as she sleeps/Then I climb in bed and I hold her tight/I just lay there awake in the middle of the night/Thinking bout the wreck on the highway’”.
An all-encompassingly relatable passage like this really bottles the essence of Springsteen as everyman king, and summarises why he could easily follow Bob Dylan into the Nobel ranks, were his lyricism not quite as homespun and plain-spoken, a little too unassuming for the academy, though never any less beautiful for it. We’re left chilled, but with a wondrous sense of the mutability of tomorrow and the imperative of living a full life. After that, are we really so sure after all that the song isn’t a precursor to the certain death of a nation? Two things can be true at once, as the victim here well knows. We never discover his fate, as an ambulance whisks him away into the night.
Roads To The North 