Bruce Springsteen was a young man for the span of two albums. His twin releases from 1973, Greetings From Asbury Park, N.J. and The Wild, the Innocent, and the E Street Shuffle, were populated by teenage tramps who skipped school, acted cool, stayed out all night, and, generally, felt all right. By the time Born to Run was released in the summer of 1975, Springsteen was starting to put his childish things away. “Maybe we ain’t that young anymore,” he sang on the opener “Thunder Road,” and he acted accordingly. From that point forward, Springsteen’s music was filled with more hardened characters: men with death in their eyes, women who were hated for just being born. Everything about his records, from his increasingly gruff vocals to his toughening physical appearance, seemed to signal a push toward maturity. “I ain’t a boy, no, I’m a man,” he sang on 1978’s Darkness on the Edge of Town, as if the authoritative chug of his band and his mean, clean-shaven mug on the cover didn’t say as much already.
The most immediate selling point of Chapter and Verse, a new compilation accompanying Springsteen’s memoir, Born to Run, is that it extends Bruce’s on-record adolescence by five songs. In addition to the 13 album tracks he selected to represent his growth as a songwriter, the set also features, for the first time on an officially sanctioned Springsteen release, music predating his tenure on Columbia Records. For the most part, it’s clear why these tracks have never been a part of the larger Springsteen story, why he never felt the urge to pull a Mudcrutch. They mostly find Springsteen trying on different personas, looking for a sound that fits. The set opens with “Baby I,” a primitive cut from 1966 by his teenage crew the Castiles, and then we get the Townshend-worship garage rock of the following year’s “You Can’t Judge a Book By Its Cover,” while 1970’s “He’s Guilty (The Judge Song),” by his early band Steel Mill, is a simple, Southern fried sing-a-long.
While none of these cuts will knock “Sad Eyes” out of your top 300, 1972’s “Ballad of Jesse James” is the set’s biggest revelation. Boasting a Levon Helm-worthy chorus (“Don’t you wanna be an outlaw, children?”) and introducing many of the musicians who remain a benchmark of Springsteen’s sound today, “Jesse James” showcases Springsteen’s already-arena-sized ambition at a time when he didn’t necessarily have anything important to say. It also feels like the first moment on the album where a recognizable Bruce emerges. The guitar solo forecasts the heavier work he’d do on Darkness, while the caterwaul at the end sounds a good deal like the one that would eventually close out “Backstreets.” Even the outlaw narrative is something Springsteen would return to again. Of the five new songs collected here, this is the one you might want to start preparing a sign for when the next E Street tour rolls around.
After that initial run, we’re left with a tidy run-through of Springsteen’s discography. The tie-in with the memoir means that we’re focusing largely on his more personal work. Gone from the set are the more character-based tracks that appeared on 2003’s comprehensive The Essential Bruce Springsteen and 1995’s chart-focussed Greatest Hits. In other words, no “Hungry Heart,” no “Atlantic City,” no “Glory Days.” He does, however, make room for 1995’s literally-based-on-a-fictional-character “The Ghost of Tom Joad” and 2002’s fireman’s lament “The Rising.” But these tracks speak to a crucial aspect of Springsteen’s work: Despite the long monologues he’s been known to deliver at shows, his music has never been all that autobiographical. A telling anecdote about Bruce involves his right-hand-man Steve Van Zandt berating him at the inclusion of the confessional “Ain’t Got You” on 1987’s Tunnel of Love. “Nobody gives a shit about your life,” the guitarist told him, “They need you for their lives. That’s your thing.” (We’ll see how Van Zandt responds when the sales reports for Bruce’s memoir come in.)
Whether Springsteen’s songs tell his story or our story, the tale is one for the ages. Much of Springsteen’s catalog was designed specifically to grow old with him (“If you wrote them well, they sustain,” Springsteen told a journalist this year when asked about touring 35-year-old songs.) Chapter and Verse arranges his work in a way that rings true to his journey. Following the opening string of songs, “Born to Run,” sounds here like the revelation that it was: a perfect distillation of the music he loved and a culmination of the work he had already done. Same goes for 1987’s “Brilliant Disguise,” a ballad sung with the urgency of an artist finally finding the words to express exactly what’s been on his mind. Other cuts like “Badlands” and “Born in the U.S.A.” help move his story along, illustrating the new vocabulary and sounds that defined the albums each track introduced.
The more recent selections are equally powerful. “Living Proof” from 1992 is a should-be classic that captures the rush of emotions accompanying new fatherhood. “Long Time Comin’,” a song penned in the ’90s but not released on a record until the mid 2000s, is another gem. During early performances of it, Springsteen introduced it as one of his rare “happy songs,” but its joyful tone got buried by the more morose material on Devils & Dust; here it feels utterly euphoric. “Wrecking Ball,” a divisive song about a sports complex penned in 2009 to commemorate the closing of Giants Stadium, also speaks to a lot more in this context. In six minutes, it refits “Born to Run”’s momentum to a less glamorous narrative, refining the heart of Springsteen’s muse into seven short words: “Hard times come, and hard times go.” That message is also reflected by the album’s flow, spanning from “Baby I”’s prepubescent power-pop through the ghostly “My Father’s House” and finally landing on a place of acceptance.
“I always picture it as a car,” Springsteen said of his career in a recent Vanity Fair interview. “All your selves are in it. And a new self can get in, but the old selves can’t ever get out. The important thing is, who’s got their hands on the wheel at any given moment?” The last few years have seen an uncharacteristic turn toward nostalgia for Springsteen that’s led from 2014’s Album Collection Vol. 1 to this year’s River Tour and the upcoming memoir. With the opening five songs, more than 60% of Chapter and Verse is pre-Born in the U.S.A., giving a heavy skew toward his early days. It’s clear that this wasn’t designed as a greatest hits set, or even a Springsteen-for-beginners mixtape. Hopefully, it proves to be an excuse to move forward and a way to leave the past behind. You can imagine any number of similarly structured compilations (maybe one of his love songs that opens with “For You” and peaks with “If I Should Fall Behind,” or a politically-charged one that draws a line from “Lost in the Flood” to “Matamoros Banks”). Chapter and Verse takes a relatively safe route, but it’s a beautiful ride: one where everyone in the car feels united and hellbent on making it out alive.
