Lucky Town by Bruce Springsteen

Album cover for Lucky Town - Bruce Springsteen

Lucky Town is the tenth studio album by Bruce Springsteen, released in 1992. This album was released on the same day as Human Touch. The title track was featured in the film Lucky You. Springsteen was working on Human Touch, which he intended to release sometime in 1990, but the project took him longer than he thought. He shelved the project in early 1991 and came back to it in September of the same year. Intending to record one more song for the album ("Living Proof"), he ended up with ten new songs, which became Lucky Town. Once he completed Lucky Town, he decided to release both albums at the same time. While most of the songs from the album have received little to no performances since the reunion of the E Street Band, "If I Should Fall Behind" closed many of the shows during the 1999-2000 Reunion Tour and was included in the Live in New York City DVD and CD release.

It took Bruce Springsteen several years to finally feel that he was finished with <i>Human Touch</i>, the first record he’d made without the E Street Band. About a week after sending off the album to be mixed, Springsteen called his engineer with the news that, while finishing up the track “Living Proof”, he’d also written a whole <i>new</i> batch of songs he wanted to record. The tunes he’d written for what would become <i>Lucky Town</i> sounded nothing like the smooth synthesiser compositions on <i>Human Touch</i>—and, in fact, the whole project came together in a little over a month. The inspiration for the lyrics on <i>Lucky Town</i> came from the same places that they did on <i>Human Touch</i>—relationships, men and women, fatherhood—but the stories are simpler, and there’s more humour: “Better Days” features the line “I took a piss in fortune’s sweet kiss,” while “Local Hero” tells the sardonic story of Springsteen seeing his photograph in the front window of the drugstore in downtown Freehold, New Jersey. But <i>Lucky Town</i> also gets deep. “Living Proof” is a confessional about the birth of Springsteen and Patti Scialfa’s first child, “Souls of the Departed” was inspired by the Gulf War and “If I Should Fall Behind” could have doubled as wedding vows. Most artists in Springsteen’s situation would probably have shuffled through his pile of finished songs, picked out the best ten or twelve tracks and put out one album. But Guns N’ Roses had recently released both <i>Use Your Illusion</i> albums on the same day, and Springsteen and his manager made the case to the record company that <i>Lucky Town</i> and <i>Human Touch</i>—his first new albums in four years—should hit shelves the same day in early 1992.