Tunnel of Love Review

After a stadium tour of unimaginable scale the correct commercial move was another stadium record. Instead he went home, played most of the parts himself, brought members of the band in one at a time, and made something intimate and faintly cold. Brilliant Disguise is the key track, a man singing to his wife about not knowing which of them is lying, and the arrangement leaves him almost alone with a drum machine.

One Step Up counts the small failures of a marriage in domestic detail: a heater that will not light, a bar he should not be in. Tougher Than the Rest is the closest thing to a love song and even that is a negotiation. The production is thin by design and a little dated in the reverb, and a couple of tracks in the middle drift. But the honesty is real and unusual, and it is the only record from that decade where a superstar used his platform to admit he had no idea what he was doing.