Roll of the Dice: Reason to Believe

“We love you, Bruce!” —a voice from the crowd on November 16, 1990

 

“But you don’t really know me.”  –Bruce Springsteen’s response, immediately before playing “Reason to Believe”

Except for a very select few of my readers (you know who you are), we don’t really know him.

And in 1982, three decades before he opened up about his lifelong struggle with depression, we knew him even less.

Which may be why “Reason to Believe” was such a Rorshach Test of a song when it was first released on Nebraska in 1982.

Rolling Stone said it “offers a ray of hope amid all this sadness.” The Sioux Falls Argus-Leader called it “one of the two most depressing songs on the album, ranking with Paul Simon’s ‘Slip-Slidin’ Away’ for pessimism.”

Robert Hilburn characterized it as “bittersweet humor,” reminiscent of Randy Newman–but the daily paper in Lincoln, Nebraska noted that Bruce sings it “without apparent cynicism or irony.” Bruce Pollock of The Journal News cites the song’s “respect for the indomitable spirit of humanity.”

But the most unsettling take belonged to the New York Times: “Facing [the possibility that there are no answers] has driven more than one sensitive soul right up to the edge of the abyss, and over it. One can only hope that Springsteen will either find ‘some reason to believe’ or learn to live without one.”

Looking and listening back, it’s impossible not to hear the detachment in Bruce’s voice as he progressively loses himself in the song; by the final verse, he’s almost swallowed up by it.

Nebraska is one of Bruce’s most thematic albums, and its theme is disconnection. Every character suffers from some kind of alienation; severed relationships pervade the album. Alienation from one’s father, from one’s brother, from one’s lover. Disconnection from one’s past, one’s future, the very laws and norms that hold society together.

Not every song Bruce wrote during that period is dark, but the fact that he curated that particular subset for his album is hard to view as anything less than a cry for help. And “Reason to Believe” is the exclamation point at the end of it.

And yet even now, it’s possible to read Bruce’s lyrics as hopeful, and when he’s performed it in the modern era, we hear it that way, too.

That’s because “Reason to Believe” is hopeful–as hopeful as it is despairing. It works on both levels because anyone who has struggled with depression and is still with us has also grappled with hope. And the distillation of that dichotomy can be found in the most important word in the entire song: some.

Seen a man standing over a dead dog by the highway in a ditch
He’s looking down kinda puzzled, poking that dog with a stick
Got his car door flung open, he’s standing out on Highway 31
Like if he stood there long enough that dog’d get up and run
It struck me kinda funny, seemed kinda funny sir to me
Still at the end of every hard day people find some reason to believe

“Reason to Believe” isn’t a story. It’s a series of vignettes, each of which illustrates the folly of hope, life, or love: in the end, we’re alone.

The first verse is the most ambiguous. Is this man discovering and grieving his own pet, tormented by his guilt over his own unwatchfulness? Or is he the driver who struck and killed the dog? Either way, he’s unable to process the fleetingness of life, how something can be so vibrant one moment and vacant the next.

Now Mary Lou loved Johnny with a love mean and true
She said “Baby I’ll work for you every day, 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, funny yeah to me
How at the end of every hard-earned day people find some reason to believe

If life is fleeting, at least love is eternal. Right? Bruce argues otherwise in the second verse. Our heroine is the breadwinner, a rarity in 1982, but despite her devotion to her love in all ways emotional and domestic, she is abandoned.

And like the dog owner in the previous verse, she cannot allow herself to process her loss. He waits for his dog to get up and run; she waits for her lover to come back to her. Neither is going to happen, but both refuse to move on.

They still believe.

For some reason.

When we say “for some reason,” we mean: “I have no idea why.” In the first half of “Reason to Believe,” Bruce empathetically chides his characters for their inability to accept their loss. For some reason, the man believes his dog is about to stir; for some reason, Mary Lou believes today might be the day Johnny comes back.

But Bruce’s narrator knows better. His characters are permanently disconnected.

Verse Three takes an existential turn:

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 whitewashed shotgun shack, an old man passes away
Take his body to the graveyard, 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

It’s worth noting at this point how skillfully and economically Bruce uses parallel construction to nudge his listeners into doing the hard work of creating a story in their own mind rather than simply tell it himself. He never tells us that Kyle is the old man who dies in the second half of the verse, any more than he tells us that the groom in the final verse is stranded at the altar. But we know, because Bruce trusts us to notice and understand his literary craft.

As for the verse itself, Bruce is questioning the meaning of life itself. We live, and then we die. Does it matter what we do in between? No matter how devoutly we live our lives, we all end up the same way. And yet Kyle’s mourners still believe.

Congregation gathers down by the riverside
Preacher stands with a Bible, groom stands waiting for his bride
Congregation gone and the sun sets behind a weeping willow tree
Groom stands alone and watches the river rush on so effortlessly

It’s a horse race, but for my money the final verse cuts the sharpest. Anyone who’s been married understands this verse. Time is suspended on that day, and every detail is hyper-vivid. A wedding is an act of ultimate trust and therefore also a moment of ultimate vulnerability.

That afternoon must have stretched into eternity for that groom, and yet everyone and everything else moved at normal speed. It frankly astounds me that the famously anti-marriage (at that time) Bruce could inhabit that character so intimately,

And I do mean intimately. In one of the most breathtaking moments in his entire catalog, Bruce completely loses himself in the song at this very moment.

Seconds pass, and we can’t help but feel that there’s a missing line. It doesn’t feel deliberate. I don’t think it’s an artistic decision. I’ve always believed that Bruce was simply overcome with empathy at that moment of his performance.

Wondering where can his baby be
Still at the end of every hard earned day people find some reason to believe

Some reason to believe. Bruce mocks his characters for continuing to believe for some reason. But he also envies them, because they’ve found some reason. “Reason to Believe” is almost a dialogue between Bruce and his characters, a plea from songwriter to his creations to please share with him their secret.

I mentioned earlier that the most important word in the song is some. It’s the word that gives away the game. If Bruce’s chorus referred to people finding a reason to believe, it would imply that he understood. But when he refers to some reason, it’s clear that he doesn’t.

If life is fleeting, why does it matter? If love isn’t permanent, than why love? Why risk pain and disappointment?

“Reason to Believe” is a seeking, searching, yearning question of a song, and the question is:

Why?

Although Bruce didn’t tour behind Nebraska, “Reason to Believe” came out almost immediately on the Born in the U.S.A. Tour. But it took years before Bruce figured out how to translate the song to the stage.

In its early outings, Bruce used a minimalist full-band arrangement to create a sense of intimacy in arenas, but it was never very successful. (Bruce dropped it altogether for the stadium leg.)

In 1990, he performed it at his now legendary Christic shows, with a newfound vulnerability in his vocals born of therapy.

But I’d argue that it wasn’t until the 21st century that Bruce successfully channeled the alienation at the core of “Reason to Believe” and unleashed its potential in concert.

Bruce’s first breakthrough came on his 2005 solo acoustic tour, where he used a bullet mic to create an artificial sense of distance and separation between narrator and audience via a stomping blues arrangement.

And then came the Magic Tour.

In a stroke of inspired genius, Bruce completely reinvented “Reason to Believe” as a show-stopping rocker in an arrangement lifted straight from Norman Greenbaum’s “Spirit in the Sky” (and as reader Chris points out in the comments below, also more than a little similar to The Beat Farmers’ 1985 cover of Bruce’s original).

Bruce’s introductory dissonant harmonica blasts hit us like anguished existential screams into the void. And when the band finally kicks in at full power… it’s nothing less than electrifying the first time we hear it (and every time after, too).

It’s so sonically powerful, in fact, that I think many fans completely miss the irony and significance of the arrangement.

Because “Spirit in the Sky” is a song about preparing for death.

But it’s also about being at peace with death, because it’s the gateway to a better place. It’s about embracing faith in the absence of any earthly evidence to support it.

It’s about believing, for some reason.

So we best believe that Bruce’s Greenbaum-esque arrangement for “Reason to Believe is a deliberate if implicit statement.

Bruce’s 1982 recording of “Reason to Believe” was a question, but when he performs it today, it’s an answer.

Reason to Believe
Recorded: January 3, 1982
Released: Nebraska (1982)
First performed: July 1, 1984 (St. Paul, MN)
Last performed: July 11, 2016 (Paris, France)

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