10 Most Underrated Rock Ballads Of All Time
1. Highway Patrolman - Bruce Springsteen
The biggest challenge when constructing ballads is trying to make a specific problem seem almost universal. No one has the same experiences, and it's easy to write yourself into a corner when you're trying to please everybody all of the time. Everyone does have a family though, and the Boss showed us just how complicated those families can be on this track off of Nebraska.
Being mostly just Springsteen and an acoustic guitar, this entire track plays out as an unraveling of a relationship between two brothers. Though things start off alright for both of these men, they come out of the post-war years going in different directions, one becoming a highway patrolman and the other turning to the wrong side of the law to make ends meet.
While it's easy to look the other way for your family, the entire song comes to a head in the final verse when the patrolman gets a call saying that his brother is on the run and it's up to him to apprehend him. After chasing him all the way to the Canadian border, the patrolman decides to let him go, thinking that the pain of cuffing him would be too much for him to take. That's the kicker to this whole scenario though. There wasn't any bloodshed here, but there didn't need to be. These two now have deep scars that are never going to go away.