Bruce And The Promise Of The Forgotten Albums

It's not easy being a music fan invested in the Bruce Springsteen's music. Not because there are weird detours like his sould excursion Only The Strong Survive but because he is now entering a phase of his career where curating his work becomes more pressing for him, which means that there is more and more of all the famously discarded material now officially available, as made evident by The Promise chronciling all the songs recorded in the run-up to Darkness On The Edge Of Town or The Ties That Bind - The River Collection. Added to that there are the demos and other scraps that stay unoffcially unreleased and there is just so much music to go through. Famously prolific, it is said that for every album Springsteen does bring out, there is at least another (or an entirely different version of it) that stays in the vaults, and that is true. Sometimes, there is more than one. Sometimes there is more than two. Springsteen's vault of unreleased material literally has hundreds of unreleased songs in various states of composition and mastering.

Like every Springsteen fan, I'm dabbling in arranging and re-arranging this material, and the release of lat week's Tracks II boxset, including seven albums of material, is a good an excuse as any to get back into the alt Bruce business. Actually, the last dib into OBG versions of Bruce stuff, Don't Back Down, was due to the box set coming out, as I wanted to get my version out before the official one did last week. With that out of the way, we can now go back and settle into a more chronological approach, which means back to the mid-70s we go... 

The Promise, the album that is the One Buck Record of the day, largely but not exclusively draws from the compilation of the same name that covers songs Bruce recorded beteen 1976 and 1978 to create a companion piece to Darkness On The Edge Of Town. The idea was to make it a brighter, more optimistic companion, while not necessarily abandoning entirely Bruce's preoccupations and themes on Darkness. This isn't an all-out party or 'let's celebrate we're young' record, which are albums you possibly could have made out of the The Promise box set. No, this is an album that looks for balance, for some light in between the moments of doubt and darkness that you can still see and feel in the distance. I didn't want to go overbaord and create an anti-Darkness, but rather an album that feels like it could stand alongside that work while also being able to stand on its own as an album. 

So you get the optimistic opening punch of "Rendezvous" that clearly recalls Born To Run musically and lyrically ("we'll be riders,through all of the night") and was first issued by Greg Kihn in the late 70s, but also mood pieces like "The Preacher's Daughter", a Darkness outtake that is the only officially unrelesed song on here and on eof my faves of Bruce's stash of still unreleased songs. And there's the title cut, which lyrically would have fit like a glove on Darkness. Still, I realized that even though I didn't want to do another Darkness, I was inevitably drawn to the moodier, more serious songs rathar than Bruce's tribute-pastiches to Buddy Holly, The Animals or 60s girl groups, so The Promise did end up being a bunch of slower, moodier tunes anway, so I drafted in his version of "Because The Night" to make it a little more lively. 

I probably did it unconsciously, but the album seems itself to do the bridge between Born To Run and Darkness, having the numbers that sound most like Born To Run ("Rendezvoous", "Iceman","City Of Night on the first side, whilde side two gets moodier and more downbeat, even as Bruc's protagonist's try to hold on to notions of romance and optimism in "Hearts Of Stone" or "The Way". But even the song's protagonist's urging "Come On (Let's Go Tonight)" - the early version of Darkness' "Factory" -  has something desperate to it. They want to shed their troubles downton, but Elvis is dead, and there is nothing to do about 'em anyway. Fittingly for an album that starts with the promise of a "Rendezvous" and the ringing sounds of Born To Run, the album ends in a darkness on the edge of town, just down Thunder Road. During the long coda of "The Promise", Bruce's protagonists find themselves on Thunder Road once more, but the road, and its promises have irrevocably changed. Where in the original song, Thunder Road was the promise of an unknown, but surely better, future, this Thunder Road is a road to nowhere, a dead end street. 

The idea of my version of The Promise as to spotlight a number of absolute top notch Springsteen songs, that - scattered as they are on Tracks, The Promise and the vaults, don't necessarily get their due. Here, they make sense together, they give sense to each other, and they are appreciable as another, slightly sunnier path through the dark roads the boss was cruising and choosing in 1978. If the promise of The Promise is, to have a real album made of these things that the Boss couldn't or wouldn't quite fit together, then I not quite humbly say, promise fulfilled. What say you?