Roll of the Dice: I Wanna Marry You

“You always dream of the kind of love that comes without consequences, without struggle and without responsibility. The kind that doesn’t exist.” — Bruce Springsteen, March 10, 2016

Some songs simply don’t age well.

It’s not the retro, Latin, Drifters-esque arrangement–that sound never goes out of style.

And it’s certainly not the band’s warm and earnest performance. Danny deservedly gets the accolades, but Garry is an undersung hero throughout, and Clarence carries the coda skyward with his soulful solo.

Nor is it the vocals–whether we’re talking about Bruce’s pure, impassioned lead or Stevie and Clarence’s delightfully doo-wop backgrounds.

Musically, “I Wanna Marry You” is sublime. It’s just too bad about those lyrics.

As Bruce was always quick to point out, there was a reason he didn’t write much about mature love and marriage in his early years. “I stayed away from that subject for a long time,” he told Neil Strauss in an interview for Guitar World in 1995. “I didn’t write about relationships, probably because I didn’t know much about ’em and I wasn’t very good at ’em.”

He’d get there, of course. It would just take a few more years for him to acquire the life experience to do so with confidence, eloquence, and nuance. In the meantime, he’d “test it out” (as he referred to it in the same interview) with songs like “I Wanna Marry You.”

We can award points for earnestness–it took some guts in 1979 for a rock musician to sing with such sugar and syrup.  And it took even more to acknowledge the realities of life in doing so, even if the 29-year-old songwriter didn’t seem quite certain exactly what they were. But what we bestow for intent, we must temper for execution.

Our narrator introduces us to his love interest right from the top, although we never learn a thing about her besides the fact that she’s a single, working mother.

I see you walking baby down the street
Pushing that baby carriage at your feet
I see that lonely ribbon in your hair
Tell me am I the man for whom you put it there

Let us pause for a moment to acknowledge one of the most memorable lines in Bruce’s entire catalog: Tell me am I the man for whom you put it there.

It may be the single most cringeworthy lyric he’s ever written–the most patronizing line in a song that’s pretty much musical mansplain. (The “little girl” quotient is especially high in this song.) And metrically speaking, the man who only seven years prior performed rhyming acrobatics with breathtaking aplomb now contorts himself through three times the syllables required to say “is that for me?”

And yet I’m sure it warms the heart of every grammar school English teacher. So there’s that.

Awkwardly paternal elocution aside, though, we might still think this is a sweet love song… until we reach the second verse.

You never smile girl you never speak
You just walk on by darling week after week
Raising two kids alone in this mixed-up world
Must be a lonely life for a working girl

Little girl I wanna marry you, oh yeah
Little girl I wanna marry you, yes I do
Little girl I wanna marry you

Wait, what now? Our narrator doesn’t even know this woman? They haven’t even spoken?

In later years, Bruce would explain that “I Wanna Marry You” is a fantasy–the kind you have about that beautiful person who walks by you once and is never seen again. In that moment you imagine an entire life with them. It’s a sweetly seductive notion–so much so that Bruce succumbed to it more than once, pairing “I Wanna Marry You” in concert with another original song, “Here She Comes Walking.”

And if the song lingered in the realm of fantasy for the duration, we might concede the conceit. But it doesn’t–when we return from the swooning refrain, Bruce takes us squarely into the domain of the pragmatic.

Now honey I don’t wanna clip your wings
But a time comes when two people should think of these things
Having a home and a family
Facing up to their responsibilities

They say in the end true love prevails
But in the end true love can’t be some fairytale
To say I’ll make your dreams come true would be wrong
But maybe darling I could help them along

Little girl I wanna marry you, oh yeah
Little girl I wanna marry you, yes I do
Little girl I wanna marry you

This is actually a fascinating passage. It’s strangely cynical for a romantic fantasy: I can’t make your dreams come true. Our love won’t be magical. But it might be good enough. And besides… we really ought to consider getting hitched and starting a family, because we’re not getting any younger. And yet… Bruce sings with such sincerity that one might swoon to hear it.

As is often the case, Bruce tucks the true heart of the song away in the song’s bridge.

My daddy said right before he died
That true true love was just a lie
He went to his grave a broken heart
An unfulfilled life, girl, makes a man hard

The first couplet is almost autobiographical, except for the fact that Bruce’s dad was still alive at the time. Decades later, Bruce would tell his audiences about how his father dismissed love songs as government propaganda. I can’t help but think his dad informed this passage.

But underneath the humor is a raw emotional truth: our narrator, we suspect, is frightened of ending up like his dad: unfulfilled, hardened, and lacking love. Or as he puts it immediately after:

Oh darling, there’s something happy and there’s something sad
‘Bout wanting somebody oh so bad

It’s a clever line couched in a melody so sweet that it almost slips by us unnoticed: there’s something happy and there’s something sad about wanting somebody so bad. There’s something missing in our narrator’s life, and it’s a hole he’s trying very hard to fill. He’s looking for love more than he’s looking for a specific person to love.

That doesn’t stop him from professing his fidelity, however:

I wear my love darling without shame
I’d be proud if you would wear my name

(In later years, Bruce would tip his hat to the datedness of the song by adding a parenthetical “….hyphenated!”)

This is a song about desperately wanting to be married–just not necessarily to anyone in particular. Bruce copped to “testing out” the concept of writing about relationships, and “I Want to Marry You” certainly sounds like the kind of song written by someone still trying to figure out if love is even real.

He’d find out soon enough.

Bonus: “I Wanna Marry You” was one of the earliest songs recorded for The River, and it was included in the original one-disc version submitted to (but then revoked from) the record company. Bruce finally released the single-disc version of The River in this 2015 box set, The Ties That Bind: The River Collection.

What most fans don’t realize, however, is that the version of “I Wanna Marry You” included on that disc is not the same version as the one on the original two-disc The River. The backing track is the same recording, but the mix is different, and the vocals are too. Listen below and compare with the audio and lyrics above and you’ll see what I mean.

I Wanna Marry You
Recorded: July 1979 – May 1980
Released: The River (1980), The River: Single Album (2015)
First performed: October 3, 1980 (Ann Arbor, MI)
Last performed: July, 28, 2016 (Oslo, Norway)

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