Darkness On The Edge Of Town - Bruce Springsteen (1978)
Ideated from: a recommendation by my esteemed coworker, JVS
I’ve talked before in this space about how the 80s started in 1978, but Springsteen already had a head start: He’d been making the music that would fill stadiums in the 80s by at least 1975. The story goes that he was stuck making a fourth record. He had the songs–so many that he gave away Fire to the Pointer Sisters and Because The Night to Patti Smith when he couldn’t fit them to the themes and sound he was chasing.
He recorded over the 30 songs in two different studios over the course of ten months. When he was finally done, he’d achieved what he was looking for. The record was cohesive, literate, and ambitious, loaded with what he thought at the time were “less commercial” tracks but wound up becoming the commercial sound of the future.
Tracks I Liked
Badlands - Max Weinberg leads the band out onto the highway and the boss steps on the gas.
Adam Raised A Cain - a total ripper.
Racing In The Street - maybe an attempt at a sequel to Thunder Road, but nobody is gonna hold that against it. I am a cis-het American male who’s old enough to remember Ronald Reagan, but I have no earthly idea what “a 396, fuelie heads, and a hurst on the floor” means.
