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SPRINGSTEEN DARKNESS ALBUM HOW TO
With no chance of escape, you have to figure out how to deal with what's in front of you. "You can ride this road 'til dawn, without another human being in sight," goes a line in the richly emotional mid-tempo rocker "Something in the Night". So like all Springsteen records in the early part of his career, there are many songs about cars and driving, but these people seem to be going in circles, idly moving from one place to the next. Where the characters in Born to Run were racing against death, the characters here are cursed with the burden of survival. The darkness that envelops the town keeps the characters in and the rest of the world out. In "Racing in the Street", the bittersweet ballad that ranks with the best songs Springsteen has ever written, the narrator's girlfriend "Stares off alone into the night/ With the eyes of one who hates for just being born." But she's not going anywhere.
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Where Born to Run was about drama, with a sense of bombast that pushed past cinematic and wound up somewhere closer to Broadway, Darkness, despite its share of rockers, is about grim acceptance and pressing on in the face of doubt. Indeed, it's striking just how different Darkness is from its predecessor in tone and theme. He was embarrassed by the hype that had put him on the cover of Time and Newsweek simultaneously in 1975, and he didn't want to be the "next big thing." The Promise documentary included with the box, which combines black-and-white video footage taken in the studio while the album was recorded with recent interviews, makes clear that he wanted to make an "honest" record that people would take seriously. That's partly why he burned to cut another record- to "find out what he's got," to quote a line from "Badlands" that particularly appealed to him. And since the lawsuit kept him out of the studio when he wanted so badly to record, he kept piling up songs while he waited for the smoke to clear.Įven more than the lawsuit, Darkness seems like Springsteen's instinctive recoil from the Born to Run hype. He made a bleak and bombed-out album, the story goes, because he was feeling lost in the world himself, fearful that he was losing control of his career. Much of the material was written when Springsteen was embroiled in a lawsuit with his former manager, and a lot has been made of the impact the legal proceedings were said to have on Springsteen's muse. Where the Born to Run box from 2005 looked intently at the album proper (there were few outtakes from those sessions anyway) and portrayed what resulted as a landmark, The Promise focuses on a period of time that produced one memorable album but could have produced others. That much is clear when listening to the album itself, which is in danger of being overshadowed by everything released around it. And in addition to containing its share of treasure, The Promise ultimately confirms that Springsteen is a brilliant editor of his own material. This is a trove, a vast clearinghouse from a fertile period, the product of which turned out to be one terrific album. So calling this a reissue of Darkness on the Edge of Town is not accurate.
SPRINGSTEEN DARKNESS ALBUM PLUS
Taken all together, we're talking 10 hours plus of video and audio, along with the booklet. And the latter is housed in a faux spiral-bound notebook with facsimiles of Springsteen's handwritten studio notes from the time. There's a 2xCD, 3xLP set that contains 22 unreleased songs from the period, and then there's a deluxe box set that augments the unreleased material with a remastered version of Darkness and three DVDs. The Promise, a name given to two sets based around unheard music from Bruce Springsteen dating to 19, when he was writing and recording the seminal Darkness on the Edge of Town, doesn't fit easily into typical reissue categories. Sometimes reissues add a few demos or outtakes, sometimes they add a bonus disc with a live show or additional music, and sometimes they go so far with the bonus material they become something else entirely.