Roll of the Dice: Your Love is All Around Me

We’ve examined a lot of Bruce’s unfinished, never-released home demos on this blog. Many of them are mere seeds, hooks, or riffs with which Bruce seemed momentarily infatuated. Others seem like great-grandparents to songs that eventually got released, with lyrical or melodic DNA propagated throughout Bruce’s catalog.

But today’s roll of the dice is different: it’s a song that dates back to the earliest period of the Born in the U.S.A. sessions, and even in its rough, unfinished, acoustic demo form, one can’t help but immediately sense that “Your Love Is All Around Me” should have been destined for classic Springsteen status.

Sporting a unique concept that Bruce wouldn’t revisit until “You’re Missing,” an ironic hook, and an extended vocal lead-out riff that makes it clear that Bruce sensed its live performance potential even then, we’re forced to wonder: why in the world did Bruce abandon it?

Take a listen to this shoulda-been classic:

There are a few circulating acoustic demos of “Your Love Is All Around Me,” and we’re fortunate that one of them–the take above–features verses that are both complete (or close enough to complete, at least) and intelligible.

Bruce doesn’t waste any time establishing the song’s theme: the first verse sounds like it could have been lifted from “You’re Missing” (if that song had been written two decades earlier), with a narrator surrounded by reminders of a lost love:

I wake up in the morning and your pictures there
The closet’s filled baby with the clothes you used to wear
I smile… I still got that ring baby on my finger
Although you’re gone away your memory lingers, and ’cause

Your love is all around me now
Your love is all around me now
Your love is all around me now
Around me now, around me now

When that first chorus comes in, we almost have to laugh: what would sound like a happy-in-love hook if quoted out of context is instead revealed to be the torment of a haunted husband who can’t escape the visible reminders of an ex-wife who abandoned him. In fact, “Your Love Is All Around Me” sounds very much like a cross between “You’re Missing” and “Back in Your Arms.”

In the second verse, we learn the reason why our narrator can’t escape his ghost: he simply can’t bring himself to toss the only reminders he has left of the love he so desperately wants to cling to:

Baby baby when you went away
I tried but I couldn’t throw these things away
The color of your face, the smell of your hair
I turn over at night and though there is no one there, baby

Your love is all around me now, tonight
Your love is all around me now
Your love is all around me now
Around me now, around me now

And what’s worse, he knows full well that his emotional prison is one of his own making–but he prefers the torture to the inevitable half-life of lost love. Better to feel the pain if it helps you relive the glory than to lose even the memory of what it felt like to have it at all:

Now my friends tell me what I’m doing, right
But they don’t have to walk in my shoes everyday, every night
If it’s wrong or right baby I don’t know
But I know I’d rather live like this than let it all go, ‘cause

Your love is all around me now
The love we had is gone but I still feel it
Your love is all around me now
Around me now, around me now

What follows is a full three minutes of self-flagellating chorus riffing, with our narrator’s plaints turning progressively (and literally) darker:

Oh somebody turn out the light on me now
Oh lady let this darkness come in
Oh baby let the night fall around
Oh let the darkness fall on me now

Like I said, this isn’t a happy song. But it’s an infectious one, and it would have been right at home on Born in the U.S.A., an album full of darkly tinged songs with upbeat arrangements.

So again, we wonder: why hasn’t “Your Love Is All Around Me” seen the light of day?

Well, perhaps it will: We can tell from the demo recording that the song was almost finished at the time, and tantalizingly, Bruce is known to have recorded at least a demo take with the E Street Band.

Reportedly, that take circulates among elite collectors, but unfortunately I’m not among their ranks. Even so, simply knowing it exists raises hopes for its eventual release. And with both Born in the U.S.A. and Tracks 2 box sets long-rumored to be in the works, an official release of “Your Love Is All Around Me” in the not-too-distant future doesn’t feel like that much of a long shot.

Let’s hope.

Your Love Is All Around Me
Recorded: Early 1982 (demos only)
Never released
Never performed

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