[Dreams] die hard, if really at all, and that, inevitably, is what Darkness On The Edge Of Town is all about. "I lost my money and I lost my wife," murmurs Bruce on the cathartic title track, "somehow them things don't seem to matter much to me now." But that's hardly an admission of failure, or even of retreat. He's merely measuring his losses, emotionally and morally, and raising the ante for the next round. "I'll be on that hill with everything I've got," he concludes in a roar. "I'll be there on time and I'll pay the cost." The implication, of course, is that Bruce has already paid the cost, but whatever the renewed price, it's still the only dream in town.

In the previous albums, Springsteen delineated a mythos and an ethos foremost, occasionally to the detriment of his characters' credibility. But where before those roles may have bent under the burden of their own verbose romanticism, here they crouch a bit more warily, bitter yet resolute, flawed yet fathomable. In place of his Jersey Shore Ishmaels, Springsteen has fashioned a small-town Ahab, the heroic equivalent to Cain, who makes an appearance here, too, assailing his birthright while taking pride in his curse. In Badlands, when Bruce trumpets the lines "Let the broken hearts stand/As the price you gotta pay/We'll keep pushin' till it's understood, and these badlands start treating us good," it's more than a show of bravado; it's a flash of epiphany, and a deadly one at that: the singer wants the reign of his own fate, and he's willing to wrench it from God's hands if need be. (p. 22)

[It's] up to Springsteen's vocals—and, of course, the lyrics they carry—to detail the mood and movement within the songs, and it's in that marriage of intent and consummation that Darkness achieves its stunning apotheosis. The singing, in each vignette, has the quality of inevitability about it, that the narrator had to exclaim his experience if only in order to reclaim his faith, whether it be the impotent boaster of Racing In The Street or the raging dreamer of The Promised Land. But make no mistake: it's a proudly dark kind of faith that pervades this album, the faith of one who knows "What it means to steal, to cheat, to lie/What it's like to live and die." That's not just the bluster of an antedated pop romantic, as some would claim, but the acute ethos of one whose ability to combine imagery with melody—and make it meaningful and moving—is nearly unsurpassed in modern music. (pp. 22-3)