It takes a lot of darkness to out-dark Darkness on the Edge of Town, but “Breakaway” manages to do it.
“Breakaway” is easily the bleakest song to come out of the Darkness sessions and is surely a contender for the title across Bruce’s entire catalog.
And yet, it’s paired with such a gorgeous backing track that unless we fight to pay attention to the lyrics, we probably feel more uplifted than depressed.
That’s quite the feat. Let’s take a listen and see how Bruce pulls it off.
There’s a lot going on here. We’ll get to the lyrics in a moment, but let’s start with the homages. The most obvious one is Bruce’s wink at Roy Orbison’s “It’s Over.” Not only does Bruce lift the persistent drum riff wholesale, he also borrows Roy’s melodic phrasing at times.
Listen to Roy’s delivery of “Your baby won’t be near you any more” in the audio below, and compare it with Bruce’s “now the promises and the lies, they demand it” in “Breakaway.”
And then of course, there’s the thematic similarity between the two songs–they’re both completely bereft of any hope or light.
There’s another “Breakaway” callback that goes back even further than Orbison’s classic breakup song: that “Ronde-Ronde” chorus, lifted from The Shirelles’ first single, “I Met Him on a Sunday (Ronde-Ronde).”
What made Bruce choose that curious chorus tribute? I honestly don’t know. Unlike “It’s Over,” there’s no thematic or subject matter similarity between “I Met Him on a Sunday (Ronde-Ronde)” and “Breakaway.”
Perhaps Bruce was just reaching for that classic, lush sixties ballad sound and was looking for a nonsense chorus typical of the girl group years. Regardless, the choice is striking, almost distracting. It pulls our attention from the verses to the chorus–and maybe that’s intentional.
Because boy, those verses.
Let’s just establish up front that nothing actually happens in “Breakway.” There’s no story arc, no love triangles, no moral dilemmas, nothing–just three vignettes.
A gambler gets in too deep and loses everything; a bartender turns a trick in a parking lot; somebody dies out on the street.
That’s the song.
Sonny abandoned his car last night
Had a meeting on the docks with a light blue Monterrey
To breakaway
Sonny was playing all his cards last night
In a hotel room he dealt his life away
To breakaway
Perhaps Sonny got off lucky by signing away his car as a gambling loss, but it sure seems likely (given the rest of the song) that the meeting on the docks was a more sinister one–unable to pay his debts, Sonny is thrown off the pier and drowned.
Hoping to break away from whatever metaphorical chains bound him, he ended up breaking away from life itself.
(Sonny will return in “Racing in the Street.”)
Now the promises and the lies they demand it
Let the hearts that have been broken stand as the price you pay
To breakaway, oh, breakaway, oh Ronde, Ronde, Ronde, Ronde Ray
To breakaway
Yes, that’s the chorus for “Badlands” you spotted there. Although Bruce was working on “Badlands” at the same time he recorded “Breakaway,” that iconic line (“let the broken hearts stand as the price you’ve gotta pay”) wouldn’t migrate to “Badlands” until several months later. Bruce isn’t one to let a great line go to waste.
Janie slipped from behind the bar last night
Cashed out and walked onto streets rainy and grey
To breakaway
Janie slid into a car last night
In a parking lot she gave her soul away
To breakaway
Whatever ambiguity we find in Sonny’s vignette, there’s a lot less in Janie’s. Dissatisfied with her lot, she turns to sex as a means to escape it. Her fate may not be as final as Sonny’s, but Bruce implies that she dies a death of a different kind.
(Don’t lose heart: Janie will return someday, too.)
We must also take notice here of what may be the most twisted lyrical/musical juxtaposition in Bruce’s catalog: the “sha la la” backing vocals deliberately meant to evoke the innocence of the girl group era. This is a modern touch, not present in the original 1977 recording; when polishing the song for The Promise in 2010, Bruce called on Patti, Soozie, and the Alliance Singers to provide those “sha la las.”
We also hear the E Street Horn, a modern addition that unfortunately sounds exactly like the overlay it is, to add even more verdancy.
Finally, there’s Bobby, who we meet in his final moments.
Bobby lay ‘neath a sheet of stars last night
His back on blacktop still warm from the heat of the day
From breakaway
Bobby went down hard last night
Saw a shooting star as the evening light slipped away
From breakaway
We have no idea what led to Bobby’s demise (although the fact that he “went down hard” implies some kind of violence), but it’s clear from the “sheet of stars” metaphor that he’s gone, gone, gone. But in his final moments, he sees a shooting star–a rare and fleeting glimpse of beauty that momentarily breaks through and ultimately away.
If there’s a message to be found at all in “Breakaway,” it’s that no matter how bleak your life may seem, it can always get worse.
And if you turn to the wrong cure, you may find it more final than the disease.
Breakaway
Recorded: June 1, 1977 (core track)
Released: The Promise (2010)
Never performed
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A great post about what I’ll easily, without hesitation call one of the most underrated songs Springsteen has ever recorded. An absolute gem, and it’s unsurprising you’d appreciate it given your love of Western Stars. As I said underneath “There Goes My Miracle”, songs like this had me hoping even before Western Stars’s promotion as country-inspired that the next Bruce album would sound exactly the way it ultimately did. This is, to me, the defining song of the subset of Magic/WOAD/Promise material that culminates in Western Stars, and thus the defining song of an entire era and style of Springsteen, and yet I’ve basically never seen anyone even mention its existence.
It’s as lyrically compelling as it is musically stunning, a sort of meta commentary on or deconstruction of countless other Springsteen songs, especially of the BTR/Darkness era: these songs are full of people trying to break away from something (“pulling out of here to win”, “get to that place where we really wanna go”, “spit in the face of these badlands”… the list goes on and on), but I feel like in most of those songs, the desire *to* break away is, while still at times complexified and justified (Darkness in particular is great for this), taken for granted. The idea that Springsteen songs, particularly of the mid-late 70s, are often about characters trying to break away from something and get to some better place, is basically just a given, and so that desire to break away is the *emotional driver* of the song, but isn’t *the focus of the song* in itself, merely a backdrop and motivator for the characters whose *individual circumstances* and process of attempting to break away and/or means of coping until they (possibly) manage to (try to) do so are more so at the forefront of the song.
This song, right down to its title, stands as a fantastic exception to that. It takes the factor that *internally motivates* so many Springsteen characters, whose stories and circumstances are then the most direct focus of the song, and makes that internal, nebulous, abstract, intangible factor — the desire to break away — the focus of the song itself.
It takes the backdrop of most Bruce songs of its time, places it at the forefront, and thereby serves as a commentary on all of them — and a striking, astounding, chilling, and affecting commentary at that.
Bruce has written about how in Born to Run, the escapism is a bit more hopeful that there at least *might* be a “free ride” — that getting out just might manage to be a process that extracts nothing from you — whereas in Darkness, the hope of a free ride is gone; getting out will take something away from you. But I’m not sure how much this appears on the record directly (which, to be clear, is still a fantastic album that I think easily clears even the fantastic Born to Run in terms of psychological complexity and thematic cohesion.) I think it shows up the most clearly *off* the record, in “The Promise”… and this song right here.
My hot take: I actually think the broken hearts line works better — by *far* — in this song than in (the still obviously excellent) “Badlands”. In “Badlands”, it’s a little nebulous; why is getting out going to break hearts? But here, in “Breakaway”, the stakes couldn’t be clearer. We see example after example of just how the desire to escape breaks the hearts, crushes the spirits, and pollutes the lives of these narrators. It’s like a grim, stark, bloody realization of his ’92 adage that “with every wish, there comes a curse.”
It’s like if we got to follow Eddie across the river or see what happens after the bus ride to Atlantic City. For those songs, the ambiguity is the point, and for those songs, it’s right that we don’t get to see what comes next… but it’s very worthwhile that this one song shows us the darkest possible endings for characters like those — these characters’ similarity to an Eddie or the “Atlantic City” narrator only further highlighting that this song is as indelibly linked to the major hits of the Springsteen canon as virtually any “proper” album track you can name, outtake status be damned. This is an essential Springsteen cut whose status as a deep cut among deep cuts, likely never to be played live and buried on the back end of a compilation, in no way reflects its significance to the thematic tapestry of the canon of which it’s very much a part, and I would argue almost a cornerstone; its undercutting of and implicit commentary on a “Thunder Road”, a “Born to Run”, even a “Rosalita (Come Out Tonight)” is entirely on par with the undercutting by and commentary from the far more beloved “The Promise”.
A truly magnificent song and, for me, the glowing, resounding, stunning high point of the compilation on which it finally was given to us — and in the same league as whatever one deems the best track to be from almost any other Springsteen record, in my opinion.
As The Promise is nominally a compilation, I don’t know whether the sequencing of “Breakaway” into “The Promise” had any thought put into it… but as The Promise is also kind of a studio album, it certainly might have, as at any rate, by god does that pair absolutely knock it out of the park and function cohesively on both a musical and thematic level.
This is almost as great as he ever gets, in my opinion. An indispensable, release-defining, beautiful diamond of a song and the dark, sinister shadow hiding behind and lurking beneath so many songs that millions more people have heard.
I’m repeating myself at this point, but seriously — this song paves the way musically for Western Stars while being an *actual deconstruction of “Born to Run” of all things.* The canon is so much richer for its magnificent presence.