Reasons to believe

A wonderfully ambiguous song that reveals the depth of Springsteen's songwriting talent

A lot of people misunderstand Springsteen. They recoil from his corniness and sincerity, and mistake ‘stories about romance and redemption’ as uncritical endorsement of those things. I don’t really blame them. Born in the USA was famously misapplied by Reagan, but many of his songs have a similar characteristic. They are virtually begging to be taken at face value.

Dig in a bit, though, and you realize that it’s actually much more complicated. To pick one obvious example: Born to Run. The line that probably screams through your mind is “tramps like us, baby we were born to run!” and then you hear that bombastic wall of sound swell of guitar and brass. But what is the song actually about? After a few verses celebrating the power of escape and the promise of the open road, the final verse makes it clear that “everybody's out on the run tonight but there’s no place left to hide.” Everyone is searching for something, but most of them never find it. And the singer and Wendy, what do they get in the end: “Together, Wendy, we can live with the sadness / I'll love you with all the madness in my soul.”

You dream mad dreams, you love like crazy, you drive away into the night, pulling out of the town full of losers because to not do so would be to succumb to the weariness. But there’s no perfect life waiting around the corner for them. Just new and different kinds of pain, which maybe they’ll be able to get through together. Or maybe not.

The underlying sense of frustration and decay comes through even more clearly on his subsequent albums. Racing in the Street from Darkness on the Edge of Town is a virtual sequel to Born to Run. It tells about the faded dreams and suffocating feelings that follow after the promise of escape. The title track from The River is equally grim:

I remember us riding in my brother’s car
Her body tan and wet down at the reservoir
At night on them banks I’d lie awake
And pull her close just to feel each breath she’d take
Now those memories come back to haunt me
They haunt me like a curse
Is a dream a lie if it don’t come true
Or is it something worse?

Springsteen himself is clearly well-attuned to this feature of his songwriting. It’s part of why he constantly returns to his old songs in new ways, trying to explore layers that were hidden in the original.

I won’t deny that Springsteen has some genuinely cringey songs. But I think on the whole he does a pretty good job of occupying the liminal parts of the American Dream, the spaces in between the promise and the crash. And telling the stories of the sort of people who are forced to live there: with all the tedium and crushing sadness that sometimes comes along with it. He’s searching for heroes who believe in love, not because it fixes everything, but because it’s better to believer than to give up.

At the end of every hard day, people find some reason to believe

Which brings us to this song. It’s the final cut off his acoustic album Nebraska. Which itself is a very interesting document in the Springsteen mythos, stripping away the E Street band, the big production, the sweaty crowds. It could have been made fifty years before or fifty years after. There’s a reason it’s generally the most popular Springsteen record among people who don’t particularly like Springsteen.

Sadly, I think Reason to Believe is one of the few tracks on that record that doesn’t quite work. The performance here is good (it’s Springsteen, after all), but doesn’t do full justice to the complexity of the song. The vocals are a bit flat, too matter-of-fact, and somewhat out of sync with the guitar. The guitar line also doesn’t offer much variation, and the punctuated bursts of harmonica are a little to sharp. Again, it’s a great song anyway. But it feels like one that he might have wanted another whack at.

You can see that in his live performances. It’s one that he’s come back to a lot over the years, but has also changed around a lot in terms of style. On the Devils and Dust tour, he made it as gritty and sharp as possible. A few years later, when I saw him on the Magic tour, it was a full-blown E Street Band rocker. Which was lovely, but still missed something critical.

Fortunately, there is an excellent cover that I regard as the definitive take of the song, performed by the always-great Aimee Mann and Michael Penn from the Badlands tribute album.

It opens with Penn singing and strumming alone. As the first verse ends, the organ kicks in, providing a great harmony. Then, the third component of the harmony enters in as Mann joins in singing. This blending of voices and registers turns out to be essential the song, which is ultimately about the power of connection and distinction.

The song takes place through a series of vignettes: a man standing on the side of the road next to a dead dog, a woman waiting hopelessly for her husband come back to her, a baptism and death, a groom standing alone at the altar. In each case, something is lost, and the main character faces that loss with a feeling of shock, but also a feeling of grim optimism. This is embodied in the final line of each verse: “struck me kinda funny…how at the end of every hard day people find some reason to believe.”

The beautiful thing about this line is it’s ambiguity. It’s entirely unclear whether it’s meant to be a good or bad thing. For example:

Now Mary Lou loved Johnny with a love mean and true
She said “Baby I’ll work for you every day and bring my money home to you”
One day he up and left her and ever since that
She waits down at the end of that dirt road for young Johnny to come back
Struck me kinda funny, seemed kind of funny sir to me
How at the end of every hard earned day people find some reason to believe

In the positive sense, there’s a sort of wonderment at the spirit of human resilience. That in spite of the pain of lost love and lost dreams, people persevere and find reasons to believe. In this sense, the song becomes a testament to the strength of people to never give up, to never succumb to the sadness. It tells us that there is honor in living our lives.

But perhaps the more straightforward reading goes in exactly the opposite direction. In the negative case, Springsteen is simply musing at our human frailty—the way we obstinately believe against all odds that things will simply turn around. By this account, Reason to Believe is essentially a series of dark comedies, filled with stories of ridiculous people who simply cannot face their loss and so retreat into themselves.

And there’s something deeply and fundamentally human about this. In the face of suffering we constantly search for meaning, even if there is no meaning to be found. We rage, rage against the dying of the light. And I love that about us. Which is why I prefer the optimistic read on this song. Even though this means I’m doing exactly the same foolish thing as the characters in it: insisting on the happy reading even when the facts suggest otherwise.

Because that’s what human beings do. And it’s good that this is so. We really do need to find reasons to believe, even in the worst of situations. It’s not always healthy. You can’t let your dreams become a substitute for living your not-so-perfect life. But there is a place for obstinate, dogged refusal to accept that all is dark.

I think the third verse illustrates this best:

Take a baby to the river. Kyle William they called him
Wash the baby in the water. Take away little Kyle’s sin
In a whitewash shotgun shack, an old man passes away
Take the body to the graveyard. And over him they pray
Lord won’t you tell us, tell us what does it mean?
At the end of every hard earned day people find some reason to believe

Great loss is an indelible feature of the human experience. So is great joy. And while it would be nice to have the one without the other, it’s not actually possible. Our victories are defined by our losses. Our joy is defined by our pain.

And that’s why I always come back to the Michael Penn and Aimee Mann version. Because in their twinned voices, you can hear the tension brought to life. Their harmony—not identical, but complementary—embodies the larger human experience. It’s not simply a narrator wryly observing the human condition. It’s two people (a husband and wife) actually being human together. Sharing in the unrealistic hope, and celebrating the reasons we all find for continuing to believe.