In 1975, Bruce Springsteen released his runaway hit record Born to Run. Up to this point, Springsteen had established himself as a songwriter, but Born to Run made him a rock star. The next question, of course, soon became, “What will Springsteen do next?” The answer to this question was a three-year journey of songwriting and recording that all culminated in the release of the 1978 album Darkness on the Edge of Town.
In the fall of 2010, HBO released a documentary entitled The Promise: The Making of Darkness on the Edge of Town, which, as the title suggests, is an in-depth exploration of how this record came to be. I have always known that Springsteen was an artist and a visionary, but I never understood to what extent until I watched The Promise. There is an entire segment in which the members of the E Street Band discuss how Springsteen and drummer Max Weinberg labored for days — days — trying to make the snare drum sound exactly right on one of the album’s tracks. Clarence Clemons’s saxophone solos were recorded and re-recorded time and again. For Springsteen, everything had to be perfect.
What interested me most, however, was not the labor that went into the sound perfection (although that was fascinating) but the tracks that were left on the cutting room floor. This is actually the main subject matter of the documentary and the box set that was released in connection with it. There were some truly great songs that were recorded and eventually abandoned not because they lacked quality but because they did not perfectly fit within the theme of the album overall. While it is not structured in the traditional “concept album” kind of way with seamless transitions and such (a la Dark Side of the Moon), the album carries an intentional theme and unified concept. This is not merely a collection of rock songs — it is a structured narrative meant to evoke a specific emotional response from its listeners. Even songs that would have been destined to be big hits were omitted from the record because of their lack of continuity (the big example of this was the song “Because the Night,” which Springsteen famously gave to Patti Smith who then went on to have a tremendous hit with the song)
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. Some of these songs, such as “Sherry Darling,” would later appear on Springsteen’s next record, The River.
The songs on Darkness on the Edge of Town live in a very intentional state of tension between hope and despair. Springsteen uses his trademark storytelling technique to articulate the sorrow of financial destitution, relational decay, and the deep inner longing to get something more out of life. Springsteen has been quoted as saying, “I’m not writing songs to tell you about me. I write songs to tell you about you.” He does not simply tap into his own experiences as much as he relies on the experiences as the mythical American “everyman.” This has always been his mode of operation, but Darkness takes this method to a whole new level. On the previous album, Born to Run, Springsteen’s stories mainly took place in a territory with which he is intimately familiar — namely, New Jersey. Darkness attempts to explore other places as well (“the heartland,” Utah). As Sprinsgteen explores this tension between hope and despair, his perspective gets much bigger, and the stories become more universally human.
Rob Carmack Rob is a teaching pastor at Fellowship of the Parks in the Fort Worth area of Texas
