“Everything had to go”: The Bruce Springsteen songs that were too good to release
Every single Bruce Springsteen record needed to have a certain throughline half the time.
Even if the characters in every one of the songs didn’t have to share the same songwriting extended universe, you could at least hear that all of them were going through a similar set of problems, be it those who were looking for a sense of escape on Born to Run or people from the wrong side of the tracks on Nebraska. But even with all of the great moments scattered throughout every one of his records, ‘The Boss’ did know when he needed to take off songs that may have been very good as well.
Then again, having too much good material is never a bad thing in the music world. Every single record label in the world is usually looking for their artists to give them that one extra song that would turn them into one of the biggest artists in the world, but that’s not how Springsteen thought. He had studied under Bob Dylan for a reason, and that meant trying to get the best out of every single record as a piece of art rather than make a catchy single for the masses.
That said, it’s not like he ran away from having hit singles, either. No one makes a song like ‘Born to Run’ or ‘Hungry Heart’ not looking to get a hit, but sometimes the biggest tunes of his career were ones that couldn’t be sold by him. ‘Because the Night’ is one of the greatest hooks that he had ever made, but there’s a good chance that he would have sounded so out of place singing that tune compared to what Patti Smith would later do with it.
But even with all of the goodwill that he had between him and the E Street Band after breaking through, Darkness on the Edge of Town is a much different record than Born to Run was. Whereas the last record was all about escapism and dreaming of reaching that promised land that existed somewhere over the horizon, hearing songs like ‘Badlands’ felt like they were coming from the perspective of people who never actually managed to get out of their nowhere towns.
That doesn’t mean that there aren’t some pieces of brilliance on here, but ‘Racing in the Street’ is one of the most melancholic songs that Springsteen ever wrote. These kids had dreams of racing towards their dreams, but it turns out that they will forever be on those backstreets that he had talked about on his last record. But even if the album isn’t the best record in terms of singles, Springsteen felt that some of the poppy stuff wouldn’t have fit the record.
There were a lot of hooks that he had in storage, but when looking at the record he was making, it didn’t make much sense for him to put out something that he didn’t feel was right, saying, “We were interested in making a record that was not just the best songs. Some of the music we recorded had too much modulation going on, too much melody. Too much richness of arrangement. Everything had to go.”
And while that sounds insane coming from someone looking to build momentum, there was no other way to make a poppy single work in the context of this record. ‘Badlands’ was probably the closest, but if he had a lot of pop-flavoured stuff that he wanted to incorporate on this record, it would have been like someone trying to put a punk song in the middle of Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours or putting the most bubblegum pop song in the middle of Metallica’s Master of Puppets.
The songs might have been what the passive audience would have wanted, but Springsteen wasn’t thinking about the fans that only hung around to sing along to ‘Born to Run’. He felt that millions of people were out there that felt the loneliness of these songs, and it was his job to give them the kind of album that they could relate to.
