The song Bruce Springsteen wishes he could delete from history
When you’ve been making music for as long as Bruce Springsteen has, you become aware of all the different fads and trends plaguing creative industries. Some are done with good intentions, as a wide-eyed artist is set on making something exciting and new, and some are done merely because they have become trendy by accident. One of the most prominent examples of the latter is the hidden track.
Before streaming services were our primary means of consuming music, and bands released their albums predominantly on CDs and vinyl, a new trend emerged: songs were hidden at the end of albums after periods of elongated silence. The origin of this trend can be dated back to The Beatles on Abbey Road when an overworked engineer missed a snippet on the final recording and published a 23-second medley outtake called ‘Her Majesty’.
Many artists used this feature to keep fans engaged with their albums and treat them to fun little songs that other, more casual listeners might not discover. This trend continued until streaming became widespread, and people stopped listening to music on physical media.
Bruce Springsteen has been making music for decades, and his constant commitment to telling the truth with his songs and reaching into different parts of himself for inspiration means his music has always been somewhat in the public eye. As such, he has always been susceptible to these different trends as and when they were happening. However, when Bruce Springsteen decided to take advantage of the hidden track, he did it not because it was cool, but because he secretly didn’t want people to hear the song.
“The main reason it’s hidden is because I never liked it,” said Springsteen when discussing his song ‘The Way’, “I would like to see it placed in a David Lynch film over a sexually perverse scene. That, to me, is its righteous home.”
Springsteen hid the track on an album called The Promise, which was made up of outtakes from when he was recording Darkness On The Edge of Town. However, even in an album that was already admittedly filled with outtakes, Springsteen wanted to take extra steps to ensure the song was heard by as few people as possible. This still hasn’t been fixed to this day, either, so if you want to listen to ‘The Way’ you either need to look it up on YouTube or sit through ‘City at Night’ in order to get to the track that Springsteen wishes he had never put out there.
Springsteen had a number of opportunities to release the song but continually tried to bury it. Initially, it was written for Darkness on the Edge of Town, but he replaced it with ‘Factory’. Then he had opportunities to put it on the albums Tracks and The Essential Bruce Springsteen but managed to call this off as well. Many artists have made songs that they wish they could delete from history, but very few have taken such active steps to do that as Bruce Springsteen with ‘The Way’. He tried to ensure the song was never released, and when it finally was, he buried it at the end of a completely different track.
