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This is some small part of what he means in his beautiful ballad The Promise, when he sings about making "my peace with the past." He dropped The Promise from his new album, fearing that it could be narrowly interpreted as a comment on his legal hassles, which he believes have been credited with "too much affect on my writing." He performs the song in concert, though, and its dour, defiant spirit haunts the album nonetheless.
Darkness passes the romantic delirium of Born to Run, cuts deeper, lingers longer. The proud prisoners of shore towns, the rod riders and front-porch madonnas, turn up again, but no longer bursting with the same heady spirit. Here the "shutdown strangers and hot rod angels" suffer a sudden, splintering sense of their own settled fates. They crash right up against that darkness in the album's title. There are a lot of victims, like the girl in Racing in the Street, one of Springsteen's best songs, who "stares off alone into the night/ With the eyes of one who hates for just being born." Intimations of guilt and the dim promise of salvation shade and deepen the darkness, but for every casualty it claims, there are others who strain against it. "Badlands, you gotta live it every day," Springsteen sings in the opening number:
Let the broken hearts stand As the price you 've gotta pay, We'll keep pushin' till it's understood, And these badlands start treating us good.
By the end of the record, the price of the darkness and its promise are held in firm perspective, accepted only if they can always be challenged:
Tonight I'll be on that hill 'cause I can't stop, I'll be on that hill with everything I got, Lives on the line where dreams are found and lost, I'll be there on time and I'll pay the cost, For wanting things that can only be found In the darkness on the edge of town.
The album is full of gruff courage and sadness, but never despair. "Darkness is about dealing with despair," Springsteen says, "about people trying to hold on to their dignity in the middle of a hurricane. You look around, you see people on the street dug in. You know they're already six feet under, people with nothin' to lose and full of poison. I try to write about the other choice they've got."
In Badlands, when Springsteen sings, "I believe in the love that you gave me/ I believe in the faith that can save me," it is not only the spirits of his Catholic childhood showing themselves, raising memories of the kid who was asked to draw a picture of Jesus and presented the nun with a rendering of Christ crucified on a guitar. What also comes through is his unshakable belief in the power of music. "When I was growing up," he says, "the only thing that never let me down was rock 'n' roll." Upon this rock, Springsteen has built his church, which glows not with heavenly light but with the carny fluorescence of a Wurlitzer.