Bruce's "Lost Albums" (pt 3)

Springsteen channels lush 1960s pop radio balladry (think Neil Diamond, Glen Campbell), nailing its beauty and existential dread. Plus: some hot stray rockers.

*This series began with Springsteen at 75 and continued with The Lost Albums unpacked (pt 1) and Springsteen country ("Lost Albums" pt 2)

The period-design album cover above — alternate title: In the Wee Small Hours of Weehawken — is a perfect illustration of the vibe Twilight Hours, chronologically the penultimate album in the Tracks II box set.

In 2018 I reviewed Springsteen on Broadway for Rolling Stone, and the following year I wrote about Western Stars. Each was an opportunity to (re-)consider the sweep of the man’s musical upbringing and subsequent songwriting career. Twilight Hours is basically a companion set to Western Stars— songs recorded at the same time in a similar style with a similar vibe. A lot of my descriptions in the Western Stars review fit both albums. Here’s an excerpt:

There have been times throughout Bruce Springsteen’s career when California has called. He named a song for the state after his parents moved there in 1971, and he’d return to it, in life and writing, repeatedly, chasing his dreams like Steinbeck’s Tom Joad. Western Stars is the latest visit: a lushly orchestrated set of throwback, country-tinged folk pop that, despite some resemblance to previous works like Nebraska and The Ghost of Tom Joad, sounds like little else in his catalog. Frankly, its sheen is off-putting at first. But once you settle in, the set reveals some of Springsteen’s most beguiling work ever.

The sonic approach is in full bloom on “Hello Sunshine,” the first single. Draped in strings and pedal steel moan, it evokes existential late-Sixties/early-Seventies radio balladry like Glen Campbell’s version of Jimmy Webb’s “Wichita Lineman” and Harry Nilsson’s cover of Fred Neil’s “Everybody’s Talkin’.” The sound dates back to Springsteen’s youth, and he channels it masterfully, with some of his most polished singing.

The vocals here are often revelatory, more Neil Diamond than Otis Redding or Woody Guthrie. “There Goes My Miracle” conjures the grandeur of Phil Spector-era Righteous Brothers and the Left Banke’s “Walk Away Renée,” with a dash of Fiddler on the Roof’s “Sunrise, Sunset.” Meanwhile, “The Wayfarer,” — with a TV soundstage worth of strings, French horns and cooing background singers (Patti Scialfa and Soozie Tyrell) — brings the sort of borderline-camp drama one recalls from The Engelbert Humperdinck Show.

That sort of drama is on equally-full display on Twilight Hours, an album that shows Springsteen’s deep love of the pre-rock pop era. It’s more than mere genre exercise. When Stephen Colbert asked him some years back what song he’d pick if he could listen to only one recording for the rest of his life, Springsteen said “Summer Wind” (as performed by that other beloved New Jersey Italian dude singer, Frank Sinatra.*

From the Track II liner notes:

Twilight Hours offers another 12 songs from this prolific period in what amounts to a companion to Western Stars, albeit with subtle distinctions that give the album its own identity.

In 2017, while the Springsteen on Broadway run was in full swing, he told Variety he had written most of a solo album, “before [2012’s] Wrecking Ball...I stopped making that record to make Wrecking Ball and then I went back to it.” His quote sheds light on a line Springsteen producer Ron Aniello posted to Instagram with the release of Western Stars, saying the album had been: “started in 2010...finished in 2014...finished again in 2018. Sometimes it takes a minute.”

“Twilight Hours was written simultaneously with Western Stars,” Springsteen explains. “At one time it was either a double record or they were part of the same record. But I separated the Western Stars material out and what I had left is Twilight Hours. I thought the material on Twilight Hours was going to throw people off because it was so intentionally middle of the road.”

Springsteen’s use of the radio-format term “middle of the road” may feel a little dismissive (the genre’s other common name, easy listening, is no better), but that’s not how he interprets it—for him, it’s something classic and fun.

In the same Variety interview, Springsteen described his then-unreleased new music as having been influenced by the Southern California pop sound of the early 1970s: “Glen Campbell, Jimmy Webb, Burt Bacharach, those kinds of records. I don’t know if people will hear those influences, but that was what I had in my mind. It gave me something to hook an album around; it gave me some inspiration to write....It’s connected to my solo records writing-wise, more Tunnel of Love and Devils & Dust, but it’s not like them at all.”

Those inspirations were unmistakable on Western Stars, and they remain present for Twilight Hours, though Bacharach has taken a step forward and Webb a step back. “That’s where I was working,” Springsteen says. “Because I love Burt Bacharach and I love those kinds of songs and those kinds of songwriters. I took a swing at it because the chordal structures and everything are much more complicated, which was fun for me to pull off.”

You’ll also notice the lyrics on Twilight Hours are far less specific than those on Western Stars, where Springsteen tells tales of a different sort of Californian, the aging celebrity, occasionally with a wink — see that album’s “Drive Fast (The Stuntman),” which echoes Springsteen’s soundtrack contribution to The Wrestler, and Western Stars’ title track, about a washed-up actor apparently reduced to doing Viagra ads (“. . . that little blue pill/That promises to bring it all back to you again”).

Twilight Hours (2010-18)

1. “Sunday Love” - A velvet-jacketed journey into suburban middle-class malaise, a pre-Summer of Love vision to soundtrack martinis in wet bar-equipped living room. It’s hilariously gorgeous, and I say that with admiration; a song Tom Jones might envy. It makes me rethink Springsteen as a pop singer, and how he fits in to that tradition — it’s not unlike how Ray Charles leaned in to orchestrated pop recordings after years of fiery r&b, and made them smolder. Patti Scialfa, Soozie Tyrell & Lisa Lowell clearly have fun with the evening-gown backing vocals.

2. “Late in the Evening” - Similarly, no fear of schmaltz here; dude goes in. Sort of a poor man’s Bacharach/David. I love the tympani-roll before the instrumental outro.

The bartender rings last call
I hear the clock up on the wall […]
Smoke hangs in the air
I reach for your coat upon the chair

But it’s not there

3. “Two of Us” - A bit of a pile-up of genre clichés, but you see what he’s going for. Kind of a garage jam, if you had a full studio orchestra in your garage.

4. “Lonely Town” - This is a bit different. You could imagine it in a Broadway musical. The vibe is very Sondheim-lichy, if you’ll pardon the pun.

5. “September Kisses” - More than a little bit of Roy Orbison here, especially in the faintly Cuban rhythm.

6. “Twilight Hours” - A good example of the songwriting here, with lyrics that get at big emotions without too many storytelling specifics. “One last drink and the night unwinds/ As we walk underneath a new morning sky,” he sings — and a lot seems to happen in that pre-dawn span of time.

7. “I’ll Stand By You” - An older song, written in 2001 for “consideration” in the first Harry Potter movie (!) per the liner notes here. It didn’t make the cut, for whatever reasons, but was released in 2019 on the soundtrack to Blinded By The Light, a sweet bio-pic based on the memoir of British Pakistani Muslim journalist and hardcore Bruce fan Sarfraz Monzoor. A must-see for Springsteen fans.

8. “High Sierra” - “I found a job at the filling station, she worked at the luncheonette” begins a song that seems like a perfect fit for Western Stars. At over six minutes, it’s a cinematic story-song loaded with detail, following a familiar Springsteen-ian arc of working class struggle leavened by love and ghosted by the past. Here, however, they are wrapped in wide-screen arrangements.

9. “Sunliner” - The first of what’s called a “four song mini-suite” in the liner notes, before Bruce confesses his fondness for the art of Andy Williams (I shit you not). I really dig the steel here, which gives it more of a Western Stars feel, ditto the sparkling acoustic guitar. Nice Orbison falsetto too — not as magnificent as its inspiration, of course. But it’s striking how much falsetto singing there is on many of these Lost Albums recordings. I wonder if it was deemed too off-brand for the LPs Springsteen released at the time, with worries it would put-off fans invested in a more butch Bruce Springsteen.

10. “Another You” - Definitely an Andy Williams-worthy jam, albeit with Max Weinberg keeping time. Bruce adds glockenspiel to give it more of an E Street vibe.

11. “Dinner at Eight” - Bruce’s woozy harmonica colors on this after-work romancer, which splits the difference between the rural Western Stars vibe and the more urbane Twilight Hours. It’s another suburban fantasia (see Douglas Sirk) and I confess I laughed out loud at the lines “One husband, one wife/ One dream of a life.” But then Bruce comes with “A tie, crisp white shirt/ To cover the scars and the hurt,” and I was like: damn — okay then.

12. “Follow The Sun” - A fantastic little pop song that should’ve been issued as a single in 1964.

Perfect World is the one “lost album” here that wasn’t conceived as, or as part of, an album project. It’s a bunch of tracks recorded between the mid-1990s and 2010 or so that Springsteen sequenced to make the closing LP for Tracks II: The Lost Albums. It’s definitely the most rocking of the albums, at least in a classic E Street sense. (Due respect to Somewhere North of Nashville, which rocks hard in a Bakersfield honky tonk style.) “Album” or not, it’s a welcome addition to the box — there are some real gems here.

Perfect World (mid-’90s - early ‘10s)

1. “I’m Not Sleeping” Very E Street, with more glockenspiel and Roy Bittan’s ascending piano chords. You could call this a song about “woke”ness in a literal sense, 25 years before the word became politicized — although the narrator isn’t so much woke as overloaded and retreated into bunker mentality. “Turn off the TV, because it bothers me/ I’ve seen all that, all that I wanna see,” he announces, holed up in his house and prepared to stay there. When he spits “Feed the rich, eat the poor/ Stack their bodies outside my door,” it sounds like he’s blueprinting the modern internet troll, or perhaps just channeling dark Dylanesque snark.

2. “Idiot’s Delight” — This blues rocker, like “I’m Not Sleeping” and the following song, are all mid-’90s co-writes between Springsteen and his Pittsburgh buddy Joe Grushecky. Bruce credits their work together during that period with helping him reboot his ‘70s - ‘80s rock’n’roll voice after a string of solo projects, many of which are reflected in these albums. Steve Earle should cover this song; Springsteen sounds a lot like him here. Grushecky did his own version, which sounds more like Dylan.

3. “Another Thin Line” — This ferocious rocker, with its grim narrative involving working class struggle (“More layoffs, up go the stock/ Busted out below, sittin’ pretty on top”) features Rage Against the Machine’s Tom Morello, a frequent Springsteen collaborator for a number of years, lobbing firebombs of guitar noise alongside Bruce’s own. This song got some play on the E-Street reunion tour in 2000, including at the Madison Square Garden show below.

4. “The Great Depression” — Another dark song about economic struggle, albeit in more of a country-rock vein.

5. “Blind Man” — This 2002 outlier sounds like it might’ve been an outtake from a latter-day record by The Band, especially with those Garth Hudson organ lines, here courtesy of Charlie Giordano, latter-day E Streeter and longtime David Johansen collaborator.

6. “Rain In The River” — Alongside “Another Thin Line,” the heaviest song on this album, indeed the entire set. Bruce hollering hard over a midtempo “We Will Rock You” 4/4 stomp.

7. “If I Could Only Be Your Lover” — “I like that song a lot,” Springsteen said in the liner note interviews. A Wrecking Ball demo that didn’t make the cut for that album because, per Bruce, “it wasn’t political enough” (though economic politics certainly ghost the narrative). Like the Twilight Hours stuff, recorded around the same time, it finds Bruce working up near the top of his range. It gets spruced up here from the original demo recording with some soaring guitar and (again) some glockenspiel informing an outro that almost sounds like a crib toy. The song takes its place in a long line of excellent jams with similar titles and sentiments.

8. “Cutting Knife” — One of my favorite songs on this odds-and-ends set, and definitely the most unusual. I have zero information about its history; it’s not mentioned in the liner notes except ine citing the credits. (Anyone with intel, I’d love to hear from you.) It opens like an old Irish or English ballad, with syntax that’s definitely not South Jersey (unless you’re talking about the Channel Islands):

I have a fair love to whom I’m not true
For this I’ve no reason that’d satisfy you
I thought myself a gentleman and kind
Yet to her good soul and beauty I’ve willed myself blind

There’s some Tom Petty-style songcraft in here, too, for sure. I’d love to hear Bruce do it with an acoustic guitar in the back of a pub, without the overcooked synths on the chorus, and the clinking of pint glasses replacing the glockenspiel.

9. “You Lifted Me Up” — An E Street spiritual, sung handsomely en masse by Springsteen, Patti Scialfa and Little Steven. It could be about God, a lover, a friend, or a community of fans. Beautiful stuff.

10. “Perfect World” — Another prayer, this one imagining a perfect world or, rather, “a nearly perfect world.” Those are the final words of this 83 song collection, and a pretty good description of the aspirational, but reality-based rock’n’roll fantasy Springsteen has been building for half a century.

*Thanks to Jay Lustig for reminding me of that interview.