Remember the days when years would go by between Bruce’s album releases?
A notorious perfectionist, Bruce would write and record dozens of songs and tinker with them incessantly while the calendar pages flipped and ripped away. Sometimes entire album sequences would be scrapped, sometimes album concepts would be, too.
But starting in 2005, the floodgates opened. Bruce released six albums in ten years, and toured behind them for eight of those years.
By 2013, he wouldn’t even wait until the post-tour downtime to get back in the studio; Bruce recorded High Hopes while still on the road touring behind Wrecking Ball.
And then while on tour for High Hopes, Bruce did something previously unimaginable: he released an EP of songs that didn’t make the album.
It wasn’t the first time Bruce had released outtakes, of course. We had the 1998 Tracks box set and in 2011, The Promise. But those collections were carefully curated, sequenced, and painstakingly presented.
By contrast, American Beauty seemed like an afterthought, a bone thrown fans’ way for Record Store Day 2014 with virtually no promotion behind it. Bruce never even played any of the album’s songs in concert.
As for the songs on the EP, they all had considerable merit, but they all sounded like they were originally intended for other albums pre-High Hopes. They almost certainly were. (I suspect Bruce wrote and recorded his demo for “Hurry Up Sundown” during the Magic/Working on a Dream sessions that yielded a similar vein of power pop melodies.)
Bruce has admitted that each of the tracks on American Beauty were originally recorded as home demos before he recut them with Brendan O’Brien. I hope that someday those original demos will escape into the wild, because at least for “Hurry Up Sundown,” the song is overpowered by the production.
“Hurry Up Sundown” is nothing more or less than a piece of power pop, and there’s certainly nothing wrong with that. The EP album cover suggests a summer day on an open road, and that’s the proper setting for this song.
Unfortunately, though, Bruce and Brendan leaned a bit too much into the power and away from the pop; the end result is a loud, assertive mix that almost drowns Bruce’s vocals.
If we strain and listen past the production, however, we hear a beautiful west coast melody paired with effortless Springsteenian lyrics.
Those lyrics are so effortless, in fact, that one suspects that Bruce tossed this one off in an afternoon, liberally lifting phrases from “Wreck on the Highway,” “Waitin’ on a Sunny Day,” and “Jersey Girl” and the theme from “Out in the Street” all in the first verse.
It’s the end of another working day
Come on and pack your blues away
Change your clothes, we’ll go for a ride
To the other side
Hurry up sundown, hurry up sundown
Hurry up sundown, hurry up sundown
Seriously, if someone wrote a random Springsteen lyrics generator, there’s a good chance it would eventually spit out that verse all on its own.
The rest of the lyrics (really just a few couplets) are more original but no more substantial. (It’s fun to play “spot the Springsteen song title/theme” though. How many can you find?)
Over here it’s easier to breathe
There’s a place for you and me
And there’s no devil here to pay
And come the light of day we pray
And together we’ll ride to the other side
We’ll feel so free, just you and me
And I’ll pay what is due
Till the night sees us through
And together we’ll ride to the other side
We’ll feel so free, just you and me
When this long day is through
Evening dims to blue
If it sounds like I’m hating on “Hurry Up Sundown,” I’m not. I quite like the song and would love to hear it played live with a bit more restraint than on the album. But given that the world seems to have forgotten it exists (Bruce never talks about it, and I’ve never seen a request sign for it), that seems unlikely.
There’s a whole sub-genre in Bruce’s catalog of fun pop trifles, and “Hurry Up Sundown” is right at home among them, just waiting for someone to notice.
Hurry Up Sundown
Recorded: March 2013
Released: American Beauty (2014)
Never performed
Looking for your favorite Bruce song? Check our full index. New entries every week!
