Not gonna lie: it’s a stretch to call today’s entry an original song.
If anything, it’s a glimpse into the earliest stages of how Bruce constructs a song. Except in this case, it’s not clear that the exercise led anywhere.
In these escaped-into-the-wild excerpts from early 1979, Bruce holds three cards: a riff, a hook, and a delightfully cynical concept–namely, that however wondrous and wonderful love might feel at first, inevitably it’s going to, well, let you down.
All four of these recordings were captured on an ordinary cassette recorder at Bruce’s house in Holmdel. In the first one, we learn that Bruce started with the riff and elements of the melody–there are no lyrics to be found.
But the second take (we don’t know how much time passed between takes, unfortunately) is considerably further along; it offers us a full five-minute window into Bruce’s songwriting concentration.
The lyrics are decipherable, but they’re also mostly bluffed and don’t warrant analysis. The only lyrics close to developed are the chorus, and they betray the central conceit of the song:
Pretty soon you’ll find out a smile turns into a frown
You better watch it, young man–love will get you down
Takes #3 and #4 are just snippets. They don’t shed much additional light, but Take #3 does at least start to develop a verse. We’re still in bluff city, but it’s clear that Bruce is trying to convey a sense of sweet agony, of the vulnerability that comes with love, and the inevitable heartbreak that will follow.
What happened to “Love Will Get You Down” after these home recordings is murky. It’s believed that the song continued to evolve and was recorded (or at least rehearsed) with the band later in the spring of 1979, but the song appears to have changed enough that the title morphed along with it–and there are a couple of candidates from surviving records, including “Love Will Be the Name” and (oddly) “Love Won’t Let You Down” (which has no relation to “My Love Will Not Let You Down“).
In any event, that later recording does not circulate broadly, so for now, the trail ends here.
Love Will Get You Down
Recorded: Early 1979 (work in progress demo only)
Never released
Never performed
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