When you’ve read and watched as many Bruce Springsteen interviews as this humble writer has, one thing is undeniable: the man is a perfectionist.
Perhaps that’s why he continues to spellbind audiences with some of the best rock music ever recorded, because in the modern age, Springsteen is still constantly selling out stadiums with ease and gets thousands of people singing along to the likes of ‘Thunder Road’ and ‘Born to Run’ as if they were only released yesterday.
Bob Dylan was one of his biggest influences when it came to writing songs. Hearing him play for the first time was a revelation for Bruce Springsteen, both in a literal and figurative sense, because literally, hearing the way that Bob Dylan spoke about the world allowed Springsteen to look upon it differently – figuratively, being so moved by music helped Springsteen realise the kind of songs that he wanted to make.
“I want people to get the same experience from listening to one of my records as I had when I listened to Highway 61 Revisited,” said Springsteen. “The idea that something was revealed to them that was fundamentally true and essential, and gave you a view of your world, your country, your town, your neighbours, your family.”
Springsteen certainly succeeded in that. His music is not only catchy and fun to sing and dance to, but his lyrics remain incredibly poignant, a combination of something which pulls on the heartstrings but that also gives listeners more insight into the world around them. You can feel nostalgic for a life you never lived, or have something underriding within the life you’re currently living pulled to the surface. However, despite the success, Bruce Springsteen, it seems, is never satisfied with what he puts out.
For instance, when he finished Born to Run, after putting an unrelenting amount of effort into what would be considered by many one of the best rock albums of all time, Springsteen despised it. “After it was finished? I hated it! I couldn’t stand to listen to it,” he said. “I thought it was the worst piece of garbage I’d ever heard. I told Columbia I wouldn’t release it. I told ’em I’d just go down to the Bottom Line gig and do all the new songs and make it a live album.”
The critique of some of his best work isn’t limited to Born To Run either. When talking about records that Bruce Springsteen would like to try and re-record, he said he would enjoy completely redoing Darkness on the Edge of Town. With songs like ‘Badlands’, ‘The Promised Land’, and ‘Prove It All Night’ gracing what is a near-perfect tracklist, it’s hard to imagine why someone would want to re-record the album, but for Springsteen, it all came down to the differences between the live sound and that made in the studio.
Bruce Springsteen and The E Street Band have always been celebrated for their excellent live performances, and for the most part, that energetic sound translates to their recorded material. When listening to Darkness on the Edge of Town, Springsteen felt like they underplayed, and as a result, didn’t give those listening the full force of the E Street Band. He has always said he’d like to try and redo the record to see if they could come up with something new, but whether it would actually come out any different remains up for debate.
“There are things that I wanna re-record that I was unhappy with the original studio recordings of. [The] Darkness album, mainly, the Darkness record, which was a record that I thought had some of my best certain types of songs, some of my best songs, had a lot of good ideas. But I always felt that it was a little dry recording-wise,” he said.
Concluding, “I felt like I over sang and that we kind of underplayed… so that stuff sounds quite a bit different in performance and I’d be interested in getting different versions of a lot of those songs.”
