I was streaming KTKE on my way to the links the other morning and Bruce Springsteen’s fantastic Brilliant Disguise  came streaming through the car radio, allowing me to sing my ass off along with the Boss, finishing just as I pulled into the Buchanan Fields parking lot.

No question, Bruce sticks largely to his working class roots and experience when composing lyrics, and he is indeed a strong songwriter with respect to words, meter, and rhyme.

Springsteen’s Darkness on the Edge of Town LP made our initial Top 60, and still is my favorite album by Bruce, but Brilliant Disguise, and Out in the Streets (from The River) are my two favorite songs by the artist.

Brilliant Disguise, which riffs of the early days of Rock’n’Roll in two nice little homages, is really a great tune about relationships, honesty, how we present ourselves to others, and most important, how we see others and how they see us.

The Boss implores a lover’s confusion about barriers for two choruses asking “tell me what I see, when I look in your eyes?” but concludes his last chorus turning the tables asking “tell me who you see when you look in my eyes?”

Brilliant Disguise riffs  in its nod to the beat of The Drifters’ Save the Last Dance for Me, and then as the words complete, makes reference to Lou Christie’s The Gypsy Cried, both tunes from 1962.

Anyway, just before latest Republican debate and the Donald Trump travelling sideshow, days before the Iowa Caucus, well, let the words of the Boss ring in the back of our minds.