The Promise: Ambivalence, Lust, and the Creative Process

 Note: This is NOT a review, but here’s a good one
http://www.tinymixtapes.com/music-review/bruce-springsteen-promise

It happened during the commute home; silence, then the vocal – that voice, undeniably earnest.  The words were simple, bordering on trite, until the final verse, “I'd lock you deep inside 'til the last rains fall/And hide you from the emptiness of it all.”

Holy post-apocalyptic love song! A key turned in my middle-aged heart, and I was enthralled by Bruce Springsteen for the first time since I was 17 years old.

This song is The Way and it’s buried like a love letter at the end of a recently released double album, The Promise. This release holds 22 songs recorded when the band was making Darkness on the Edge of Town, in the mid-1970s. Not since Born in the USA, three decades and ten albums ago, have I listened to Bruce Springsteen.

I came to his music as a bookish teen from a single-mom family in a rural town, and I was almost the only Springsteen fan I knew. My friends listened to The Police and Joe Jackson and Pink Floyd. The popular kids liked Genesis, everybody was blasting AC/DC’s Back in Black, and there I was, alone in the darkness of my cousin’s room, picking up the arm of the record player and dropping the needle on that anticipatory dark shiny ring between tracks, listening to songs from The River like Drive All Night and Stolen Car over and over and … weeping.

At 15 years my senior, Springsteen was the perfect age for a crush – too young to be fatherly but old enough to be exotic – an articulate, grown man. It wasn’t just the dark, hooded eyes, the leather jacket, the bedhead hair – it was the words, the heart-grabbing words that spoke of rivers and hopelessness and cars and desperate escapes from crappy towns where nobody understands you.  I’d memorize his lyrics. I’d stare at his picture on the album cover and think there was no way in the world that we couldn’t someday be together. I spent the next few years listening to his records and sharing my lonely fandom with myself.

I was at college when Springsteen’s Born in the USA exploded into top-40 popularity. Girls danced to his songs in clubs; bars had “Springsteen Night” wet t-shirt contests. I slept out in the Syracuse winter for tickets to see Bruce and the E Street Band in concert, but I was disappointed. What I loved about Bruce Springsteen was nowhere to be found in the jubilance of the show.

For the next 30 years, I avoided his music. If I encountered a Springsteen song, it was through another artist, like punk grandma Patti Smith, who had her only hit with Springsteen’s Because the Night. I laughed when alterna-country icon Steve Earle referred to Bruce as “a pretty good hillbilly singer from New Jersey” before launching into a swampy cover of Mr. State Trooper. I thrilled to the Rage Against the Machine cover of Springsteen’sThe Ghost of Tom Joad. Yet when Bruce and the band played the 2009 Super Bowl, I barely paid attention.

Then, about a month ago, I turned on the radio to hear actor Ed Norton interview Springsteen about the making of the album Darkness on the Edge of Town.

Here was Bruce at age 60, talking about the influence of Roy Orbison and the punk movement (!) on his songs. Here he was talking about being broke and famous at the same time. Here he was talking about writing 70 songs and choosing only 10 for the album. Here he was talking about the creative process.

It stands to reason that a teenage girl who weeps over ballads grows up to be a writer, and that is what I have tried to do. But for the longest time, I took delivery of other writers’ finished product without considering how they got it done. It was only after putting together my own manuscripts, after seeing artist and musician friends grapple with composition and the recording process, after workshop upon workshop, that I grew to appreciate all that goes into a final package – whether it’s a book, an art exhibit, an album, or a song.

I was intrigued by the story behind an album I hadn’t listened to since I was a girl. For Christmas, I received The Promise: The Darkness On The Edge Of Town Story. This box set’s packaging is a word nerd’s dream, a spiral-bound notebook filled with replicated scrawled lists, scribbles, and pasted-in typewritten lyrics. It includes the documentary film The Promise: The Making of Darkness on the Edge of Town, which reveals a musician almost manic in his vision. (As a bonus, there’s enough historical footage of a lithe and winsome 27-year-old Springsteen to stoke any schoolgirl yearnings.)

But my big takeaway came from band mate Steven Van Zandt, who calls it “tragic” that Springsteen deliberately dampened his talent for writing sunny pop songs in order to create this “samurai” record, Darkness on the Edge of Town. It had never occurred to me that Darkness was Springsteen’s version of a death metal anthem, but I can appreciate that effort.

Getting older sometimes feels like an exercise in loss. What I lost when my dewy crush on Springsteen expired all those years ago was redeemed by this rediscovery,this revamped vision of a man who is less a hero and more an artist who is maybe still haunted, like so many of us, by the emptiness of it all.