The 1978 album Bruce Springsteen couldn’t stand releasing: “A huge body of work”
Everything that Bruce Springsteen ever released needed to come from the heart before it even entered the studio.
Even though he could have written a million different rewrites of ‘Born to Run’ and be set for life, he felt that his mission was to reflect the times that he was living in the same way that his heroes did. Everyone from Bob Dylan to Pete Seeger was using their songs to tell the story of the America that they saw every day, and even when ‘The Boss’ had an ace up his sleeve, he knew when he needed to throw a couple of songs away and go in a new direction.
And it’s not like Springsteen didn’t have good instincts when it came to these kinds of moves. Any other record executive would have told him to go back and come up with a hit if they were shown the makings of the Nebraska album, but having a hit wasn’t the only goal for him. Being on the charts was certainly nice, but after making albums like The River, he needed something that could wipe the slate clean all over again before he got to Born in the USA.
Because a lot of people forget that Springsteen didn’t finally have everything figured out when he made it big. It took him years to find his sound, and even though Born to Run is still the crown jewel of his discography in many respects, he had to go through all hell to make sure it got over the line. So when he finally came up for air, he was almost confused when everyone saw him as the next saviour of rock and roll.
No one needed that much pressure on their shoulders, and for someone who had already gone through his fair share of emotional turmoil, Springsteen wanted to go in a much different direction on Darkness on the Edge of Town. The E Street Band was still accounted for, and they sounded in rare form on songs like ‘Badlands’, but aside from a few upbeat songs on the project, Springsteen’s follow-up to his magnum opus had a lot more to unpack than everyone thought.
He didn’t need the big knockout single to say what was on his mind anymore, and a lot of the characters in these songs feel like those that were left wounded in ‘Jungleland’. They didn’t get to see their dreams through to the end, and a lot of them are left to fend for themselves and find whatever thrills that they could along the way. They wanted a life beyond the stretch of road they grew up on, but they all had to wear their father’s coats and go back to the blue-collar world in tunes like ‘Factory’.
Which isn’t what the initial plan was. ‘The Boss’ said that he had a wealth of tunes that sounded like Born to Run, but he could never bring himself to actually make the album sound like that, saying, “Darkness on the Edge of Town came out of a huge body of work that had tons of very happy songs. It was all music that we recorded, we wrote and made a very distinct decision to not use.”
That might have been a letdown for the new fans who just jumped on board, but it was much more satisfying in the long run. A lot of the characters in his first album needed a bit of a reality check, and when they are looking for whatever fun they can on songs like ‘Racing in the Street’, there’s more than a little bit of sadness when they realise that they can never go back to their youth when they still had that spark in them.
So, really, Born to Run and Darkness on the Edge of Town aren’t the same kind of record at all, but they are perfect companion pieces to each other. The first is this operatic rock and roll masterpiece that makes everyone believe that their dreams are possible, and the second is the kind of brutal reality that so many people face when they realise that they’ve been stuck in their hometown for far too long.
