Talking Sweet About Nothing

Atlantic City by Bruce Springsteen is a song that I know pretty well. I have listened to Nebraska more than any other Springsteen album and I've relentlessly scrutinized those songs for years now. The album is chilling with its bare production and themes of lonliness and desperation. But this morning on my drive to work I heard something that I have never heard before. The song Atlantic City, for years to me, has been a portrait of how far any person would go to outrun their demons. This man comprimising his own morals/ethics in order to get himself and his wife out of a dying town and rationalizing his decision so that he can live with it. There is an overwhelming sense of failure in his past--the choices he made that got him into his debt-ridden and unemployed situation; and in his present--the choices he is willing make in order to escape this life, no matter how dishonest (is it a hit? a drug deal? a robbery?)

What I never got until this morning is the sense of hope in this song. I mean, it's barely there. It's really just one word, "maybe."

But maybe everything that dies someday comes back

That "maybe" is as good as it gets here, but it's inspiring nevertheless. When he asks his girl to "Put your makeup on, fix your hair up pretty, and meet me tonight in Atlantic City" he's asking her to give him another chance, to start a new chapter in their life together.

It kind of seems obvious to me now. I guess I had always gotten caught up in the album as a whole. In the context of the rest of the songs, it's easy to become engrossed in the dark, haunting side of these down-on-their-luck stories. But today, for whatever reason, this popped out at me. It was one of those amazing feelings that you get when a work of art truly touches you. What made it even more special was that this was a song that I had loved for years and today one more layer was revealed to me. I got shivers up my spine, goose bumps, and even a small tear in the corner of my eye. I'm not ashamed to admit it either. You should be lucky enough to experience something like this.