The song Bruce Springsteen wrote for Stevie Nicks
During the 1980s, Bruce Springsteen was working at a prolific pace and had more songs than he knew what to do with. As a result, he regularly gave tracks away to other artists he admired, and narrowing down the mammoth list of songs for each album was an almost impossible task for Springsteen.
Most famously, producer Jimmy Iovine, whom Springsteen had known since he worked as an engineer at The Record Plant in New York on Born To Run, helped convince Bruce to give ‘Because The Night’ to the Patti Smith Group. A few years later, Iovine helped launch Nicks as a solo artist and later became romantically involved with the singer.
In this period, Iovine was responsible for tapping up Tom Petty to write her the track ‘Stop Draggin’ My Heart Around’, which became a massive hit for the singer. However, as the years progressed, she continued to become more confident and no longer wished to take on tracks that she hadn’t written on a frequent basis.
‘Edge of Seventeen’, taken from Bella Donna, was a turning point for Nicks, with her later confessing in the book Gold Dust Woman: “I finished that song, hysterically crying. And I was hooked. When I played my own song later that night, I knew — from that second on — that I was not going to sing a lot of other people’s songs. I was going to write my own.”
However, when the opportunity arose in 1984 to take on an unreleased Springsteen track, Nicks accepted the challenge. At the time, Nicks was recording her third album, Rock a Little, with the help of Iovine, and made a version of ‘Janey, Don’t You Lose Heart’, which Springsteen had penned during the sessions for Born In The USA.
However, the title of the track was reportedly a sticking point, which led to her version of ‘Janey, Don’t You Lose Heart’ never seeing the light of day. According to Simon Morrison’s book Mirror in the Sky: The Life and Music of Stevie Nicks, she altered the chorus to the gender-neutral “Baby, don’t you lose heart”, which irked Springsteen.
The title change allegedly didn’t sit well with The Boss, who didn’t permit her to release the track as she wished, and it never wound up appearing on Rock a Little. As it stands, no audio of Nicks’ take on ‘Janey, Don’t You Lose Heart’ has emerged, and it’s unknown whether recordings even still remain of her interpretation.
Eventually, Springsteen kept ‘Janey, Don’t You Lose Heart’ for himself, but it never found a home on one of his albums. Instead, he released it as the B-side to ‘I’m Goin’ Down’ in 1985.
Listen to his version below.
