Sunday Song Lyrics: Candy’s Room

I few weeks ago when I was driving to the Jersey shore it only seemed appropriate to dig out the old Springsteen albums. I had ripped his Live/1975-85 3-disc set to my iPod — if you’re at all a fan of his, it’s a terrific collection — and I enjoyed cruising through the mountains and blasting the Boss on the speakers.

One of the songs that stuck in my mind was “Candy’s Room”. Maggie McNeill had mentioned it in a post regarding songs about prostitutes. It’s one of those songs that I like because of the sound and shape of it, without necessarily listening to the words, so I hadn’t remembered that Candy was a prostitute, but it certainly makes sense from the lyrics:

In Candy’s room there are pictures of her heroes on the wall
but to get to Candy’s room you gotta walk the darkness of Candy’s hall
Strangers from the city call my baby’s number and they bring her toys
When I come knocking she smiles pretty she knows I wanna be Candy’s boy
There’s a sadness hidden in that pretty face
A sadness all her own from which no man can keep Candy safe

We kiss, my heart’s rushes to my brain
The blood rushes in my veins fire rushes towards the sky
We go driving driving deep into the night
I go driving deep into the light in Candy’s eyes

She says baby if you wanna be wild
you got a lot to learn, close your eyes
Let them melt, let them fire, let them burn
Cause in the darkness there’ll be hidden worlds that shine
When I hold Candy close she makes these hidden worlds mine

She has fancy clothes and diamond rings
She has men who give her anything she wants but they don’t see
That what she wants is me,
oh and I want her so
I’ll never let her go, no no no
She knows that I’d give
all that I got to give
All that I want all that I live
to make Candy mine
Tonight

Maggie contrasts “Candy’s Room” with John Entwhistle’s “Trick of the Light”:

Entwhistle has captured here one of the most common of client fantasies, that he is such a wonderful lover that he can impress a professional and thereby evoke emotions in her that will induce her to give herself only to him.  But while Entwhistle’s narrator seems to begin to glimpse the truth in the end (as evidenced by his plaintive “was I all right?” as she shows him the door), Springsteen’s narrator is completely lost in his fantasy that his inamorata will give up her money and freedom for him; he imagines he sees sadness in her face and that she values his poor clumsy affection over that of “men who give her anything she wants”.

With all due respect to Maggie, I think she has this one a bit wrong. The reference to “strangers from the city” suggests that the narrator is not one of them. I get the impression that he is someone who knew Candy from before she was a working girl, and that there is genuine affection between them. After all, he’s clearly not one of the men who gives her “anything she wants,” and yet she sees him anyway.

I’m not saying there’s going to be a happily-ever-after. The characters that fill Springsteen’s songs are people who lose at life, criminals and failures. But in order to fail, in order to lose, they first have to want to win, they have to have desire. And in order for it to be a tragedy, that desire has to be their downfall. And so the narrator of “Candy’s Room” desires Candy, he wants her all to himself, and that desire is the source of his torment.