(Credits: Public Domain)
Mon 27 October 2025 23:00, UK
During the Springsteen on Broadway series of intimate storytelling gigs between 2017 and 2021, Bruce Springsteen stopped short of calling the performances a “one man show” in the traditional sense. For one thing, it was still just as much a concert as a theatrical experience, and for another, ‘The Boss’ wasn’t entirely on his own.
Springsteen’s wife and E Street Bandmate Patti Scialfa was also a part of most of these shows, usually joining Bruce for duets on a pair of songs from the 1987 album Tunnel of Love: ‘Tougher Than the Rest’ and ‘Brilliant Disguise’.
For well-versed Springsteen fans, the selection of those particular tracks may seem odd at first. Rather than a more obvious love song that might tickle the heart strings during Scialfa’s nightly cameos, these were songs ostensibly about a rough-and-tumble youth trying to woo someone, in the case of ‘Tougher Than the Rest,’ and a much older rough-and-tumble man in the throes of total paranoia about his relationship, as expressed in one of the great anthems of emotional vulnerability, ‘Brilliant Disguise‘.
That latter track is generally believed to be a semi-autobiographical account of Springsteen’s own crumbling marriage to his first wife, actor Julianne Phillips, whom he’d started dating shortly after the release of Born in the USA in 1984.
“So tell me who I see / When I look in your eyes / Is that you, baby / Or just a brilliant disguise?”
Bruce Springsteen – ‘Brilliant Disguise’
The relationship with Phillips was doomed and would end after just a few years, but ‘Brilliant Disguise’ isn’t just a woe-is-me story about a humble rock and roll singer worried about his professionally deceitful Hollywood partner.
Instead, the song reveals an important twist in the final run-through of its chorus, as Springsteen turns the spotlight on his own failures in the relationship and the possibility that he himself might be the one going through the motions dishonestly.
“So when you look at me / You better look hard and look twice / Is that me, baby / Or just a brilliant disguise?”
Bruce Springsteen – ‘Brilliant Disguise’
Which leads us again to the question: why on Earth would Springsteen choose to perform this particular song with the woman he married three years after his break-up with Phillips and the uncomfortable events that inspired ‘Brilliant Disguise’?
Well, as far back as 2005, during his appearance on VH1’s Storytellers programme, Springsteen expressed the interesting way that this song had evolved in his mind over the ensuing two decades since he’d recorded it.
“I guess it sounds like a song of betrayal; who’s that person sleeping next to me, who am I?” he said. “Do I know enough about myself to be honest with that person? But a funny thing happens: songs shift their meanings when you sing them, they shift their meanings in time. They shift their meanings with who you sing them with. When you sing this song with someone you love, it turns into something else.”
According to Songfacts, Bruce continued this line of thinking when introducing Scialfa and ‘Brilliant Disguise’ during his Broadway residency, explaining to the audience – albeit in a slightly roundabout way – how a song about distrust and paranoia can become a song about love and security; or how you learn to trust a partner against your own worst instincts.
“In this life, you make your choices, you take your stand,” Springsteen said, “And you awaken from that youthful spell of immortality where it feels like the road is going to go on forever. And you walk alongside your chosen partner with the clock ticking, and you recognise that life is finite, that you’ve got just so much time, and so together, you name the things that will give your life in that time its meaning. Its purpose, its fullness, its very reality. This is what you build together, this is what your love consists of. These are things you can hold on to when the storms come, as they will.”
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