It’s astonishing how many early Springsteen compositions–even unfinished and abandoned ones–are floating around out there on paper.
I’ve written about several of the entries in Bruce’s “notebook series” before, and it never ceases to astonish me that Bruce was both meticulous and careful enough to record his early work and yet careless enough that so many of them found their way to the public via (presumably) acquaintances close enough to him to have access.
Here’s another unfinished one–it’s actually barely even started–and while it’s undated, the idealistic lyrics almost certainly place it during Bruce’s Steel Mill period, when anti-war songs were staples of his songwriting output.
“All I Wanna Know” is little more than a verse at this point, although we do have some chord notation to give us a hint of what the song would have sounded like, along with what appears to be the first line of a chorus.
It would have been interesting to see how Bruce would have developed the song–he seems to be conflating societal ills both international and domestic:
All I wanna know is will the time ever come that people can live together
All I wanna know is will there ever be a world without war
All I wanna know is will there ever be a time that you won’t have to lock any doors
Now you know just what we’re working for
You come up to me and smile
The hint of a chorus suggests that Bruce was reaching for a theme of love and companionship as the first step to overcoming strife, hate, and war.
But that’s mere speculation on my part–we’ll likely never know for sure, so “All I Wanna Know” is best considered as one more early example of Bruce Springsteen’s evolving songwriting craft.
All I Wanna Do
Never recorded
Never performed
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