For the first two decades of his career, Bruce Springsteen was both a prolific songwriter and extremely particular\u2014some, Springsteen among them, might say \u201cneurotic\u201d\u2014about which of his recorded songs he actually released to the public.<\/p>\n
The man\u2019s steady flow of creative output not only did not ebb during the extended hiatus between his 1975 breakthrough Born To Run<\/i> and its iconic 1978 follow-up Darkness On The Edge Of Town<\/i>\u2014delayed by a messy divorce from his first manager\u2014it actually accelerated. In the liner notes to this 2010 double-CD release, Springsteen reveals that \u201cDuring the year we spent recording, we made many albums. Add to this collection the material from Tracks<\/i> that had Darkness<\/i> as its origin and you have upwards of forty songs, four albums. We released one. I still believe it\u2019s the right one\u2026 but the music that got left behind was substantial.\u201d<\/p>\n
The songs collected here as The Promise<\/i> bridge the gap between Born To Run<\/i> and Darkness<\/i> in a more definitive way than the smorgasbord of individual cuts shared on Tracks<\/i>. You can hear Springsteen steadily moving beyond Born To Run<\/i>\u2019s expansive, street-punk-romantic approach toward the more grounded, naturalistic, hard-edged Darkness<\/i> and The River<\/i> as he begins to come to grips with adulthood and what that means for him and his peers.<\/p>\n
While the tracklist for The Promise<\/i> is\u2014as usual\u2014thoughtfully arranged and paced\u2014the 21 songs collected here fall pretty readily into three broad categories.<\/p>\n
The songs in the first category feel like encores to Born To Run<\/i>. Opener \u201cRacing In The Street \u201978\u201d is a full band arrangement of the Darkness<\/i> song that feels like the version he would have recorded if it had been part of the Born To Run<\/i> album\u2014big and bold and melodramatic. It also serves as a proof of concept for the definitive version\u2019s slow and stark arrangement, which is much more effective in tapping into the melancholy at the heart of the lyric. The big-boned \u201cWrong Side Of The Street,\u201d the stately \u201cSpanish Eyes,\u201d and the romantic \u201cThe Little Things (My Baby Does)\u201d similarly feel like they bridge the gap between the two albums\u2019 styles. <\/p>\n
Like \u201cRacing,\u201d \u201cCandy\u2019s Boy\u201d offers a fascinating glimpse inside Springsteen\u2019s process. The feverish clarion call of \u201cCandy\u2019s Room\u201d on Darkness<\/i> begins here as a sing-songy midtempo number, with just a couple of familiar lines retained in the final lyric. This early iteration begins draped in the romantic expansiveness of Born To Run<\/i> before adding a melancholy tinge as the narrator realizes Candy likes someone else, and resigns himself to the loss. The ferocious urgency and determination that drives \u201cCandy\u2019s Room\u201d hadn\u2019t yet entered Springsteen\u2019s imagination at this stage.<\/p>\n
The songs in the second category are ones The Boss ended up giving away to other artists. Springsteen\u2019s studio version of \u201cBecause The Night\u201d is remarkable more for what it isn\u2019t than what it is. The performance presented on Live \u201975-\u201985<\/i> remains the most powerful Springsteen version of the song; as much juice as he tries to put into it in this studio recording, it falls short of the pulse-pounding impact of either his own live rendition, or the definitive Patti Smith version. Springsteen\u2019s recording of \u201cRendezvous\u201d\u2014given to Greg Kihn after he recorded a memorable cover of \u201cFor You\u201d\u2014mostly serves to reveal how slight a song it is, just three quick stanzas, and it feels like Springsteen recognizes he never quite finished it; his performance doesn\u2019t feel fully committed. <\/p>\n
And then there\u2019s \u201cFire,\u201d to which I can only say \u201cdamn.\u201d Never mind the fact that the guy churned out four albums\u2019 worth of songs in a year; this \u201cgiveaway\u201d is such an obvious hit: catchy, sexy, charismatic. To give away a song this good you\u2019ve gotta have (a) a lot of confidence, and (b) a lot more quality material in your hip pocket. Bruce\u2019s original recording of the Pointer Sisters\u2019 big hit is one of the high points of this collection, with his love for Elvis coming through clearly, especially on the bridge.<\/p>\n
The songs in the third category offer clear foreshadowing of the music to come on Darkness<\/i> and The River<\/i>. \u201cGotta Get That Feeling\u201d and \u201cOutside Looking In\u201d are songs about disappointment, alienation, and thwarted dreams that live inside the same 1962-ish early rock framework that fed into later tunes like \u201cOut In The Street.\u201d \u201cSomeday We\u2019ll Be Together\u201d and \u201cThe Brokenhearted\u201d feel like ballads from the same era, as if they ought to be by a band called Bruce & The Moonlights. And \u201cSave My Love,\u201d \u201cAin\u2019t Good Enough For You,\u201d \u201cTalk To Me\u201d and \u201cBreakaway\u201d all also hark back to early rock tropes and arrangements.<\/p>\n
In this third category, the particularly on-point \u201cIt\u2019s A Shame\u201d offers a bluesy mid-tempo tale of a guy working hard trying to please his woman and feeling unsure if it\u2019s getting him anywhere. Both it and \u201cCome On (Let\u2019s Go Tonight)\u201d have a melancholy core that feels like a precursor to songs like \u201cFactory.\u201d Finally, the title track earns that honor by thematically spanning and summing up this entire era of Springsteen\u2019s catalog: it\u2019s a song about feeling trapped by life and forced to play a bad hand, that feels like both a melancholy postscript to \u201cBorn To Run\u201d (\u201cThunder Road, baby you were so right\u201d) and a prototype for \u201cThe River\u201d (\u201cWhen the promise is broken you go on living \/ But it steals something from down in your soul\u201d). <\/p>\n
One question remains, then: do Springsteen\u2019s real-time decisions about what to do with these songs\u2014keep developing them, give them away, or set them aside\u2014feel like the right ones? My answer is yes. Of this entire double-CD set of 21 songs, only \u201cThe Promise\u201d feels on par quality-wise with the material that ended up on Darkness<\/i>. Many of these songs touch on themes and ideas that he would go on to explore more definitively, but for the most part they lack the edge and sense of urgency that would ultimately propel his next album. The Promise<\/i> maps the road Bruce Springsteen took from Born To Run<\/i> to Darkness On The Edge Of Town<\/i>, and while that journey is interesting for any serious fan, it\u2019s also clear that the man at the microphone made a series of good calls along the way.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":34596,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"artist":[5832],"rating":[5615],"class_list":["post-46444","review","type-review","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","artist-bruce-springsteen","rating-rating-b"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/46444","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/review"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=46444"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/46444\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/34596"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=46444"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"artist","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/artist?post=46444"},{"taxonomy":"rating","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/rating?post=46444"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}