The Promise - full length - live in Milano San Siro, 7 June 2012 (by recunond)
Italy <3 Bruce (it’s mutual)
Don’t forget to watch Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band open the Grammy Awards with “We Take Care Of Our Own.” The ceremony will be broadcast on CBS at 8 P.M./7 P.M. central (note: they will not be live on the west coast, as previously posted).
The Grammys can also be streamed live here.
Bruce Springsteen - Badlands (Live In Phoenix ‘78) [The Promise] (by GneggEntertainment)
ALWAYS RELEVANT
Bruce Springsteen & The E Street Band perform songs from The Promise live in Asbury Park
Bruce Springsteen with The Roots Save My Love - Late Night with Jimmy Fallon - (via docinwestchester)
In the end, of course, it doesn’t matter what The Promise means to Bruce Springsteen — doesn’t matter beyond trivia. Like all great songs, all great art, it only matters what it means to the person who accepts it. Springsteen did not put The Promise on Darkness, though for a while he played it at clubs. Then he stopped doing that too. By the time he released it in 1999 on 18 Tracks — the first version I first heard — it was a different song, more wistful, less bitter, more sad, less rebellious, all piano. And now, more than 30 years later, Bruce Springsteen releases an album of those songs that he recorded and left by the side of the road while making Darkness. There is the bar song “Rendezvous” and his raw version of “Because The Night” and the upbeat (if disturbing) “Fire” and a remarkable rock version of “Racing In The Streets” that sounds like it belongs on Born To Run (In this version, the car is a Ford, with a 383 — probably a Mercury Marauder Engine from the late 1950s). Springsteen is 61 now and he writes now that these songs are like old friends."
Joe Posnanski, “America’s best baseball writer”, has written a fabulous piece on his blog about what The Promise and Darkness on the Edge of Town mean to him. It’s a really moving and heartwarming personal post, and it’s one of the best things I have ever read about Bruce’s music and the way it touches so many different people’s lives. Don’t miss it.
“Lean”, “angry” and “relentless” are the words Springsteen now uses to describe the feelings and sounds he was trying to capture in the follow-up to Born to Run, the hit album that landed him on the cover of Time and Newsweek and led some to write him off as just another victim of record-company excess. Delayed by a bitter legal battle over his management contract, he finally presented the public with a version of Darkness from which all traces of joy and release had been purged, replaced by a sense of desperation. The claustrophobia of ordinary lives trapped by work and family ties provided his metaphor.
Another great review of The Promise/Darkness on the Edge of Town remaster box set.
As Bruce Springsteen prepared to release the lavish boxed set The Promise: The Darkness on the Edge of Town Story , he sat down with Rolling Stone senior writer Brian Hiatt to look back on the personal trials and artistic struggles that led to his hardest-rocking record ever. To read the full Q&A, check out the new issue of Rolling Stone, on stands and in our online archives on Friday. In the meantime, check out these exclusive audio clips, in which Springsteen opens up on his relationship with his father, his life as “an alienated person by nature” and more.
Click here to listen (or link above to be redirected to the Rolling Stone audio archive)
