In November 1990 at the Shrine Auditorium in LA, a rugged, ripped Bruce Springsteen stood on stage and drawled: “This song is about the price of blind faith and what refusing to give up your illusions extracts from you.”
He then launched into Reason to Believe from his first solo album Nebraska, which tells a series of stories where life plays the cruel villain and shatters the protagonist’s hopes and dreams. There’s the perplexed old man on Highway 31 standing over his dead dog, poking it, “Like if he stood there long enough that dog’d get up and run”. Then there’s the jilted groom who waits all day for his bride, and “stands alone and watches the river rush on so effortlessly, wonderin’ where can his baby be”. Springsteen then sings: “Still at the end of every hard-earned day people find some reason to believe”.
