One Track Mind: Bruce Springsteen, “Hey Blue Eyes” from American Beauty (2014)

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There’s a moment, just when you get comfortable with the idea that this is a paean to home, love and hearth, when Bruce Springsteen sharply widens the lens. All around this couple, despite the illusion of a cocoon of safety and of love, there are troubles, there are questions, there is cruelty and death and misfortune.

“Hey Blue Eyes,” which will part of a forthcoming Record Store Day EP called American Beauty, doesn’t take the easy way out. Not about love, not about this world, not about anything.

[READ OUR FULL REVIEW HERE: We take a look at all four songs on Bruce Springsteen’s newly released Record Store Day EP ‘American Beauty,’ beginning with its raucous opening title track.]

It could be seen, really, as the next scene after “Hurry Up Sundown,” another American Beauty track which found our faithful laborer tearing out of the parking lot at the plant — white-knuckling it back to a house just like this one, and a relationship just like this one, and worries just like these.

There is solace, Springsteen seems to be saying (with his real-life wife Patti Scialfa echoing the sentiment), but no real escape. You take these moments of comfort as they come, and you try to remember them for as long as you can.

Nick DeRiso