The Boss released Human Touch and Lucky Town on the same day in 1992 to some of the worst reviews of his career. This doesn’t mean there aren’t stellar songs on both including the most poignant take on jealousy in his canon.
By Springsteen standards, the early to mid 1990s was the nadir of his career. He’d disbanded the legendary E-Street Band before the decade began and relocated his base of operations from New Jersey to California. Personally, he married Patti Scialfa and they had their first child in 1991. A singer-songwriter known for regularly delivering breakthrough albums to both critical and popular acclaim suddenly seemed to have dried up: Tunnel of Love, his last with the band until 2002’s The Rising, was released in 1987. The years ticked by and there was no new Springsteen music until the simultaneous release of Human Touch and Lucky Town on March 31, 1992, what was the longest drought in his career until that point. Previously, he’d released The River as a double album in 1980, but two albums on the same day was immediately perceived as odd, if not an outright money grab. The reviews, at least at the time, were not exactly triumphant either. Bill Wyman of The Chicago Reader called Human Touch “the worst piece of [expletive] you can imagine coming from a talent on Springsteen’s level,” insisting there was only “one passable Springsteen song, ‘The Long Goodbye.’ The lyrics don’t make much sense…but it has a bruising musical onslaught that covers up a lot.” Greg Kot of The Chicago Tribune wrote that “in retrospect, Human Touch tried to re-create the stadium-rocking aura of an E Street album, with session musicians unsuccessfully replacing the road-tested band.” AllMusic said it was “generic pop” and “his first [album] that didn’t at least aspire to greatness.” Lucky Town fared a little better. Mr Wyman noted, it was “obviously the superior work,” “a much more interesting beast, primarily because of the potency of the first three numbers [which] could have made a respectable anchor to a strong album,” but “the record’s illegitimate beginnings soon take their toll, and formula returns to the fore…What themes there are on the record – a sort of Catholic wonder and love of life alternating with the usual fears and worries of the characters in Springsteen’s ongoing New Jersey gothic – never come alive.” AllMusic said, “While Human Touch was a disappointing album of second-rate material, Lucky Town is an ambitious collection addressing many of Springsteen’s major concerns and moving them forward.” Mr. Springsteen himself explained that he released the two albums separately because he viewed them as fundamentally different, noting “I tried it [writing happy songs] in the early ‘90s and it didn’t work; the public didn’t like it.”
There is some truth to all of these claims. In my opinion, Springsteen should’ve released one album rather than two. The best songs on both – some combination of “Human Touch,” “Man’s Job,” “If I Were Blind,” “Gloria’s Eyes,” “The Long Goodbye,” and “Lucky Town,” “Better Days, “Living Proof,” “Local Hero,” and “If I Should Fall Behind” – would rank among his very best work. There is a difference tonally between the two as Mr. Springsteen suggested, Human Touch being slicker and more highly produced, but that could likely have been mitigated with some creative mixing or re-recording. There is also the sense that the material in general is different from the rest of Springsteen’s canon. The characters that populate these stories are no longer young men and women against the world, whether escaping a “town full of losers” in “Thunder Road” or drowning in “The River.” The focus is more personal, even provincial. In many cases, some might call them straight up love songs, though this should not have been surprising given Tunnel of Love covered similar topics in an even sparser mode. There is also a feeling that Human Touch leads to Lucky Town. Human Touch, as a whole, is a bit darker with more soul searching and less hope of redemption. The characters are looking for a connection, even begging for it as in the case of “Soul Driver,” but not frequently finding it. “Human Touch,” the first song on the album, states this straight out from the very first line, “You and me, we were the pretenders, We let it all slip away, In the end what you don’t surrender, Well, the world just strips away.”
By the time we get to Lucky Town, however, something has changed and the characters have found love, or something closer to it, living “Better Days” thanks to a “Leap of Faith.” Interestingly, the progression mirrors Springsteen’s personal life in a lot of ways as he struggled with the guilt of his divorce from Julianne Phillips and the emergence of what would be a life long relationship with Ms. Scialfa. It’s as if Human Touch was his own journey to Lucky Town. Like most well-crafted thematic journeys, the middle of the road is the darkest and so Springsteen arrives at one of his most lost, lonely, and most poignant tracks, “I Wish I Were Blind” towards the end of the album, long before any redemption seems possible. This is not a song one would ever hear on the radio. He’s only played it live a handful of times, mostly as part of the original tour including the highly underrated MTV Unplugged performance. To a large extent, it has been forgotten even by Springsteen fans. This is a shame because – along with “Man’s Job” which can be seen as a somewhat lighter precursor, coming a few songs earlier on the album – “I Wish I Were Blind” is perhaps his best overall exploration of jealousy and its dramatic impact on the human heart. The setup is remarkably simple and as old as time itself. A man and his lover have broken up, and the lover has already found another man. The opening lines express none of this, however, though it’s impossible to think anything good will come considering the mournful music:
I love to see the cottonwood blossom
In the early spring
I love to see the message of love
That the bluebird brings
We are introduced to a speaker who finds essential beauty and fulfilment in the world around him, the rebirth of life and the song of the birds. Love is on his mind, as well, both in what he loves and the message he reads in the call of the bluebird, but we realize love is something he no longer has in the very next line:
But when I see you walkin’ with him
Down along the strand
I wish I were blind
When I see you with your man
The second verse repeats the pattern of the first, only more intimately as we move from spring to summer. Now, he focuses on both his own personal love and the broader world, “your hair shining, In the long summer’s light” and “the stars fill the sky on a summer’s night,” as dusk advances into evening. Evening, in general, is on the speaker’s mind as “The music plays, you take his hand, I watch you touch him as you start to dance.” It’s unclear if the speaker has turned into a stalker and is actually following his former lover from the strand to the dance floor, or if he is simply imagining these events in his mind’s eye. At this point in the song, it’s not even clear if the woman he loves even knows the speaker exists. This could just be another in the line of Springsteen songs where a man marvels at a woman from afar until the next verse, when the speaker reveals they had a relationship, ultimately upending the blind metaphor. Once again, it could simply be part of his imagination given the context of the song, as he claims “We struggle here but all of our love’s in vain.” Is he making up the idea that she might want him back? Is it simply wishful thinking when, from what we know so far, she appears content with another man? Springsteen doesn’t come out and say it, but at least since Shakespeare’s Othello, we know that the “green eyed monster” can play strange tricks on a person, making them believe what isn’t true. The speaker might well be confused and the relationship is completely over. It wouldn’t be surprising if that were the case and he were an actual stalker, but the uncertainty certainly fits the overall mood and theme, especially when the uncertainty extends to his description of his own condition.
Previously, he wished he was blind. Now, he claims to actually be blind, sort of:
…these eyes that once filled me with your beauty
Now fill me with pain
And the light that once entered here
Is banished from me
And this darkness is all baby that my heart sees
The mixing of metaphors comes fast and furious as the song reaches a climax, but that should not be surprising as love has transformed to loss, and pleasure in a person becomes pain, feelings which often come to fast and furious for our liking. He revisits the past, perhaps a fond memory or even a brief moment watching his lover, but finds no solace there outside the absence. We get the sense that beyond the sense of darkness the speaker is lost and confused, as though darkness were an excuse, typical of the human condition. He might believe it is dark in his heart now, but his mind is blazing with images of him and his lover in the past, his lover and her new man now, along with snatches of the world around him. Seen in this context, we might say that wishing he was blind was the wishful thinking part. Blindness and darkness would end these visions of a happier time. Shakespeare’s Iago famously and rather ironically quipped that jealousy “doth mock the meat it feeds upon,” and in “I Wish I Were Blind,” it sets up a never ending feedback loop of despair. The speaker sees the beauty around him, remembers the beauty of his lover and in their love, but we cannot take his observations at face value. He remarks in detail on the “cottonwood blossoms,” the “summer stars,” his lover’s hair, while insisting all the light is banished from him. He cannot escape these things given the constancy of consciousness and the emotional toil he’s currently experiencing. Therefore, it would be better if, indeed, he couldn’t see at all and it is far worse that he can see, knowing his love is lost.
He wishes for emotional and physical blindness, though he knows it is not possible and his heart will continue to see his lover, even if only in his imagination. The song closes, not with a chorus, for it doesn’t have a true one, only a repeated reframe, but by restating the stakes:
And though the world is filled
With the grace and beauty of God’s hand
Oh I wish I were blind
When I see you with your man
The journey ends where it began because jealousy and loss are irreconcilable emotional states. We cannot turn them off. We cannot force ourselves to forget, erasing love from our minds, hearts, or even our eyes. Here, Springsteen alludes to a subtlety of consciousness, how our emotional state informs the world. When we are happy and content, we find beauty everywhere. When we are suffering or in pain, it’s as if beauty itself were gone and we find only the darkness in our own hearts. The only constant is the feeling at the moment, a feeling that erupts from places we cannot control, though at times, we certainly wish we could. The speaker is therefore trapped in a world where he knows beauty exists, both in people and things, but that beauty is completely and totally denied him. He cannot access it, nor can he turn away from it. The best he can do is wish it wasn’t there at all, but that wish can never be fulfilled. The only healer is perhaps time, but the song is too dark to go there, and we’ll have to wait for the release on the next album. Since their mutual releases, Human Touch and Lucky Town have garnered more favorable impressions. Billboard revisited them 25 years later and noted, “Bruce is right to insist there are great songs on each. While some critics wish he’d cherry-picked the choicest cuts to make one stronger collection, this wouldn’t have worked, given how different the albums sound…But across these two non-masterpieces, there are definitely songs worth adding to all-time Springsteen playlists and perhaps even requesting in concert via those popular ‘stump the band’ signs.” Personally, these albums were released shortly before I became a Springtseen fanatic. I discovered them while researching a term paper in college, and came to them without the expectation of Born to Run, Darkness on the Edge of Town, and Born in the USA, meaning I likely saw them for what they were, not what I wanted them to be. In that regard, I’ve never felt either was his best work, but both have always deserved a place in his canon and a few of the songs measure up to his very best.
I WISH I WERE BLIND
I love to see the cottonwood blossom
In the early spring
I love to see the message of love
That the bluebird brings
But when I see you walkin’ with him
Down along the strand
I wish I were blind
When I see you with your man
I love to see your hair shining
In the long summer’s light
I love to watch the stars fill the sky
On a summer night
The music plays you take his hand
I watch how you touch him as you start to dance
And I wish I were blind
When I see you with your man
We struggle here but all our love’s in vain
And these eyes that once filled me with your beauty
Now fill me with pain
And the light that once entered here
Is banished from me
And this darkness is all baby that my heart sees
And though the world is filled
With the grace and beauty of God’s hand
Oh I wish I were blind
Confessions of a Conservative Atheist 