I can’t even begin to fathom how much material Bruce still has in his vault, and if we extend “the vault” to include his copious notebooks, it may not be much of an exaggeration to label his unreleased material mountainous.
Springsteen scholars have spent decades documenting song fragments and recording session logs, but even today we still keep discovering evidence of previously unknown compositions.
For example: “The Informer,” known to us only because its title appeared along with a snippet of lyrics in the documentary included with The Ties That Bind: The River Collection in 2015. Here’s a screen cap:
Are there more lyrics than these? Did Bruce ever record the song? Did it morph into something else? (The lyrics we can read hint at some shared DNA with “Whitetown.”)
We don’t know, and we probably won’t know, unless Bruce chooses to tell.
But the lyrics we’re lucky enough to read hint at something in the vein of Springsteen’s crime stories:
They were all your friends, and you let them down
You were wired to every phone booth and every shadow here in Whitetown
You made a wrong move, got in some trouble
And the cops held it over your head
Whatever “The Informer” turned out to be, this was clearly an early draft. Bruce was still undecided about the lyrics (wired to every shadow, or every corner? friends or best friends?), and even the title was up in the air–it appears that the song had two titles under consideration: “The Informer” and “The Mark.”
For now, “The Informer” remains an enigma. But someday, maybe, that vault will open…
The Informer
Never recorded or released
Never performed
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