In Fall 1987, I began living with Aileen in her on-campus, single, graduate student apartment at Colorado State. We were right next door to the RA’s apartment, actually, which suggests that she was either clueless or just very cool about the whole thing. In any event, being young and in love, I was eating up all the amazing new things that life with Aileen had to offer, things I did not know about yet, like Indian food and Thai food and French press coffee and Celestial Season’s teas . . . and Bruce Springsteen. I grew up on Long Island, you see, and among my circle of friends, at least, listening to Springsteen just wasn’t done. He was from New Jersey, and we had rules about such things.
But in October 1987, Bruce released Tunnel of Love, and Aileen got a cassette tape of the album from her friend and Springsteen devotee, Danny Alexander, and she played it all the time, literally all night long. I would roll over on her tiny little dorm bed at 3:00 in the morning, cuddling and drowsy and blissful in my good fortune, our lives full of novelty and promise and desire, and Bruce would be there, “Tougher than the Rest” or “Brilliant Disguise” whispering from the tiny little stereo on her dresser. Tunnel of Love was the soundtrack of our living together, indeed, the soundtrack of my new and wonderful life, and I imprinted like a baby duck.
My favorite song on the album, by far, was “One Step Up.” The simplicity of the chord changes -- combined with the pained and bracing honesty of the lyrics about promises broken -- both to others and to ourselves -- spoke to me in fundamental ways, and I *got* it. I certainly resonated, in deeply personal ways, with the emotional/existential slog of “One step up and two steps back.”
But time moves on, and our lives move on, and kids are born, and jobs are worked, and new music comes out, and old albums are packed away, and the endless noise of modern life fills our days, and we sometimes forget about those songs that once owned our hearts and minds and nights. I loved “One Step Up,” but it eventually got lost in the mix, and sadly, I didn’t even notice that it was gone.
Until last Friday. Our local oldies radio station has recently changed its programming to include a much, much wider array of oldies, and last week while driving home from work I heard “One Step Up” for the first time in literally decades, and it was a shock and a delight. And one verse into the song, I understood that I was going to need to learn to play and sing it myself, that is was *necessary* for me to do so, that this wasn’t negotiable, that I needed to own it, backwards and forwards, from the inside out, and make it a permanent part of my neurology so I wouldn’t lose it again. And that is what I have been doing every night since.
Here’s what I have so far:
If you think I am going on too much about how perfect and powerful and necessary "One Step Up" is, that my obsession with it is probably just nostalgia, please consider the following exegesis of the song by singer/songwriter Martyn Joseph.
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Bruce writes the song over three chords, all the way through the song. Even when he gets to the middle section when the melody changes, it’s still the same three chords underneath. But it’s the narrative, the narrative that is so hauntingly beautiful. Some people might think this is a bar love song, but there is so much more going on here.
Woke up this morning, the house was cold,
I checked the furnace, she wasn’t burnin’
Went out and hopped in my old Ford,
Hit the engine but she ain’t turnin'
I don’t know about you, but I am right there within seconds. No beating about the bush. He just grabs you by the throat and drags you into this cold, broken, fractured world. It’s not a physical temperature we’re talking about: we’re talking about the temperature of a home, a relationship, passion. All is not well.
The second verse the geography changes. He’s in a motel room and we don’t know how he gets there. He’s painting us more pictures of contradiction and brokenness. The bird on the wire outside the motel room is not singing. The girl dressed in white outside the church in June, but the church bells are not ringing. All is not well in the world.
As the melody changes, we enter into something kind of rare within the male art form, which is the self-confession.
When I look at myself I don’t see
The man I wanted to be
Somewhere down the line I slipped off track
I don’t know any man, in his wisest moments of clarity with a good friend, who wouldn’t hold up his hand and say, “You know what? I’ll line up with that.”
This is for me where this song does what every great song is supposed to do. The job of a good song, as far as I can tell, after 30 years of writing them, is simply to make the listener feel like they are not alone in the world. That, I think, is art at its highest level.
So, for me, what Bruce is doing right here is telling us guys, “It’s all right. It’s all right. It’s all right.” Isn’t that beautiful?
This is no man blaming anybody else. He’s not whining on. This is a man about to make some decisions that are going to affect the rest of his days.
And this where Bruce does what he does best. He takes you to the last verse. He takes you the edge of despair, and then he throws you a promise and says, “You figure it out.”
So we’re down in the bar, and he looks across and sees a girl. And she’s looking lonely, a little sad, a little upset. The intent is there. And this is not how we want the film to end. As the credits go up, we want something more noble from our director. We don’t want that disappointment — the fall.
He leaves us with four lines of poetry:
Last night I dreamed I held you in my arms
The music was never ending
And we danced as the evening skies faded to black
One step up and two steps back
It’s that common sense of spirit that may lie within each one of us that somehow we’d love to wake up with the same person for the rest of our lives. There’d be a fresh breeze in the air through an open window. The sun would be shining and the sound of kids laughing. We’d be aware of community, of each other, of peace and mercy and justice in our world so that we weren’t the only ones. Music, art, celebration, community.
For what we really do when we gather like this, whether it be a festival or a house concert, or greet each other on the street, is to confirm our common values and our common beliefs. And it encourages us that we are not alone in the world. And we just simply, as Bruce Cockburn says, need to kick that darkness til it bleeds daylight.
Isn’t that something? This is no bar love song. You know what I think he did, across three chords, the English language, and a bit of melody? I think Bruce just summed up the human condition.
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Yeah, that feels about right.