| Bruce Springsteen – Cautious Man Lyrics | 7 years ago |
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I thought this website has a good interpretation: http://houston.culturemap.com/news/entertainment/07-18-10-where-it-all-started-for-bruce-springsteen-the-fourth-highest-earning-musician-in-the-world-songs-40-31/ The key part: "Take “Cautious Man,” for instance, where the ambivalence on display probably was hitting close to home. Springsteen’s marital woes bubbled to the surface in the guise of a man named Billy, whose life of solitude and wandering is interrupted, against all odds, by a sudden love affair. This guy is right out of some pulpy film, what with the symbolic tattoos and his adherence to the code of the road, but all that quickly goes by the wayside when this girl comes into the picture. Domesticity wins out. But only for a little while. Despite all of his good intentions and efforts to stay true, the road keeps calling to Billy. Again, a dream is the turning point, and when he wakes to find his new wife “breathing beside him in a peaceful sleep, a thousand miles away,” he tears out to the highway. But even that has now lost its luster, as Billy finds no answers, just “nothing but road.” In many ways, the song, just acoustic guitar and brooding synths, ends in the middle of the story, with Billy returning to his wife’s bedside in an ironically peaceful scene as the moon pours light into the room. We can guess how it’s going to end from the “coldness” that Billy feels, and we can extrapolate how it ended from Springsteen’s own eventual divorce. But we don’t know, and it’s the not knowing that gives “Cautious Man” its depth and unsettling sadness." |
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