Description

1978 Dutch pressing with printed innersleeve, lyric insert and pricecode A on the back cover

Coming three years, and one extended court battle, after the commercial breakthrough of Born To Run, Darkness On The Edge Of Town was highly anticipated. Some attributed the album’s embattled tone to Springsteen’s legal troubles, but it carried on from Born To Run, in which Springsteen had first begun to view his colorful cast of characters as losers. On Darkness, he began to see them as the working class. One song was called Factory, and in another, Badlands, you work ‘neath the wheel / Till you get your facts learned. Those facts are that Poor man wanna be rich / Rich man wanna be king / And a king ain’t satisfied / Till he rules everything. But Springsteen’s characters, some of whom he inhabited and sang for in the first person, had little and were in danger of losing even that. Their only hope for redemption lay in working harder — You gotta live it everyday, he sang in Badlands, but you also, as another song noted, have to Prove It All Night. And their only escape lay in driving. Springsteen presented these hard truths in hard rock settings, the tracks paced by powerful drumming and searing guitar solos. Though not as heavily produced as Born To Run, Darkness was given a full-bodied sound, with prominent keyboards and double-tracked vocals. Springsteen’s stories were becoming less heroic, but his musical style remained grand. But despite the rock n roll fervor, Darkness was no easy listen, and it served notice that Springsteen was already willing to risk his popularity for his principles. Indeed, Darkness was not as big a seller as Born To Run. And it presaged even starker efforts, such as Nebraska and The Ghost Of Tom Joad.

Track list:
1. Badlands
2. Adam Raised A Cain
3. Something In The Night
4. Candys Room
5. Racing In The Street
6. The Promised Land
7. Factory
8. Streets Of Fire
9. Prove It All Night
10. Darkness On The Edge Of Town