The song that Bruce Springsteen wanted to hide

When before the advent of the streaming platforms, which are now everyday life for most music users, the CDs were listened to happened to find a hidden track, without title in the credits that came after a few minutes of silence to follow the last “official” song of the album.

This “bizarre” seems to be traced back to the Beatlesthen in a pre cd era. The track in question is “Her Majesty”, Whose few seconds can be heard at the end of”Abbey Road“(1969), immediately after” The End “. However, it does not appear in the disc tracklist. The song was to be initially contained in the LP but then to McCartney (which was the author), but the recording technician did not throw away those few acoustic notes and inserted them at the bottom of the disc. The thing liked the group and so it was.

The most modern motivations of the choice to add something in closing could be different: either a simple “game”, or the desire to give a surprise, which was worth only for the first listening, or the lack of safety on the quality and need of this song.

Among the many who have adopted this choice (in this case linked to the last of the aforementioned reasons) there is also Bruce Springsteen. The song in question then became “The Way“.

The song comes from the recording sessions of “Darkness on the edge of Town“Springsteen’s fourth studio album released in 1978, but never joined that album,” Factory “was preferred.

He remained in a drawer, like many other recordings of those sessions (they were written about seventy songs), until 2010 when he came out “The Promise“. The collection contained some of those “scraps” of recordings, many had already been published in 1998 in the super box (6 cd) “Tracks“. Bruce, however, kept “The Way” also from this last collection, as from the subsequent compilation “The Essential Bruce Springsteen”, Published in 2003.

However, since the author of “The River” still wanted to publish that song (of over three minutes) in “The Promise” but putting it after the silence that followed the over seven minutes of “City of Night”, the last official trace of the disc.

In short, to listen to “The Way” you had to go and look for her, almost against the will or “modesty” of its author.

But why did Bruce Springsteen struggle and make this song public? Which, even without shining, has its own dignity and is marked by the sax of Clarence Clemonswhich laughs now moves us so much.

Here’s how the author explains this desire to keep it hidden, not to give birth to it: “The main reason why it is hidden is that I never liked it“, Springsteen said on” The Way “,” I’d like to see her inserted in a movie by David Lynch Above a sexually perverse scene. That, for me, is its right home “.