Connectin’ Baby Your Heart To Mine
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zw0sa9nOFVg?rel=0]
Connections — a long dark highway, a thin white line. The sinew that gathers up bones and keeps them whole — a country, a family, a couple.
If Born to Run saw its antiheroes break free of the ties that bind, and Darkness on the Edge of Town examined the consequences of escape, then The River is about the things that bring us back into community. It could be love and marriage; it could be knocking up your girlfriend; it could be the specter of a father that will not depart. Even when you flee, you can’t forsake the ties that bind.
It’s a remarkable statement of purpose — for The River, and for everything Springsteen’s written before or since. We yearn for those connections — -“I’m looking for a lover who will come on in and cover me.” We must work to keep them strong — “I’ll wait for you, and should I fall behind, wait for me.” We connect as lovers in a kingdom of days; we find our living proof and “lie beneath the eaves, just a close band of happy thieves.” As Americans, we take the long walk home to a place where “nobody crowds you, nobody goes it alone.”
Thirty-three years after that statement of purpose, on “We Are Alive,” the spirits of the dead rise again “to stand shoulder to shoulder and heart to heart.” We’re running now but we will stand in time, in life or in death, to face these relationships that ground us and loop us together. The warm embraces, the shackles; the obligations, the wages of sin. Ties that bind. Connections.
