Bruce Springsteen and David Lynch might not be the most obvious artistic pairing at first glance, but their works have more in common than some might realize. Springsteen’s music and Lynch’s film and television repertoire both use hyper-American imagery while hinting at the darker, seedier underbelly of these ideas. The traditional American iconography of baseball and apple pie becomes darker, more dangerous, and more unsettling in Springsteen and Lynch’s worlds.
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Lynch was such an inspiration to Springsteen that, when the time came to figure out what to do with an unused track by the Boss, the only appropriate setting Springsteen could think of would be in a vignette of Lynch’s moody, surreal universe.
A 2010 Compilation Revisiting The Rockstar’s Past
Between 1977 and 1978, Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band recorded what would become Springsteen’s fourth studio album, Darkness on the Edge of Town. The 10-track record followed the Boss’ seminal album, Born to Run, and included lead singles “Prove It All Night,” “Badlands,” and “The Promised Land.” The entire production was grittier, darker, and a testament to the shadowy side of rock ‘n’ roll’s long, winding street. Interestingly, Darkness featured only a small portion of the songs the band actually recorded during this time.
Although these outtakes found their way on bootleg recordings and future albums, like The River, the project in its entirety didn’t get an official release until just over three decades later in 2010, when Springsteen released The Promise. This compilation album featured Darkness outtakes, largely as the band left them in the late 1970s. Springsteen and his team added some overdubs where necessary. But as the bandleader said in the album liner notes, “On those I worked on, I did what I would’ve done to them at the time and no more.”
This compilation included a song called “The Way,” which Springsteen said his producer, Jimmy Iovine, was particularly fond of. “[Jimmy] lobbied for it in ‘78 like he was gonna keel over,” Springsteen recalled in a 2010 interview with SiriusXM. Springsteen ultimately honored Iovine’s wish, but it came with a caveat: “The Way” made it onto The Promise as an unlisted, secret track at the end of the album.
Bruce Springsteen Wanted This Song In A David Lynch Scene
Including Bruce Springsteen’s secret B-side track, The Promise features 22 tracks, including “Because the Night” (which he wrote with Patti Smith in the late 1970s) and “Fire,” a tribute to Elvis Presley, who passed away during the original Darkness sessions. The fact that Springsteen would include a hidden track on an album full of outtakes seemed odd. After all, the entire premise of the album was to include songs that didn’t have a place on a record prior to its release. Why bother hiding it?
“The main reason it’s hidden is because I never liked it,” Springsteen explained on SiriusXM. “I would like to see it placed in a David Lynch film over a sexually perverse scene. That, to me, is its righteous home.”
With its simultaneously romantic and creepy lyrics, we have to agree with Springsteen that “The Way” could have been a worthy contender for a Lynch film. The way your heart beats when I hold you tight, the way you sigh when we kiss goodnight sounds lovey-dovey enough. But the song’s bridge brings in that classic Lynchian shadow.
The way you make me feel like I belong, and if I could, girl, though I know it’d be wrong, I’d lock you deep inside ‘til the last rains fall and hide you from the emptiness of it all.
Photo by Michael Putland/Getty Images
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