Roll of the Dice: The Way

Toward the end of the era when recorded music was primarily delivered via circular, physical media, there was an annoying fad that seemed to sweep up almost every artist sooner or later: the hidden track.

The practice dates back at least as far as The Beatles and their Abbey Road album, which included a 23-second medley outtake called “Her Majesty” that accidentally ended up at the end of the album thanks to an over-tired eighteen-year-old audio engineer and the startled band’s amused reaction when they first heard the playback.

Hidden tracks popped up on other albums from time to time, but when digital CDs arrived on the scene, the quirky practice bloomed into a bona fide fad.

Sometimes tracks were hidden because they didn’t fit the theme or sound of the album; sometimes they were meant to delight fans by surprising them with an extra song when they thought they’d reached the end of the album. Sometimes they were meant as practical jokes (to startle the listener after a minute or more of silence), and sometimes they were just last-minute additions to the album after the artwork and liner notes had been completed.

In the 1990s glory days of the compact disc, it seemed everyone was releasing discs with hidden tracks: Nirvana, Green Day, Beck, Nine Inch Nails, Guns and Roses, Dr. Dre, and a host of other popular artists all took part in the practice.

Bruce Springsteen, however, avoided it completely until his 2007 album Magic, which included an unlisted track called “Terry’s Song.”

That track wasn’t hidden so much as as unacknowledged; it was a late addition to the album after Bruce wrote and recorded it as a tribute for the late Terry Magovern, Bruce’s friend and assistant, after Magovern passed away just weeks before the album’s release. The album had already been completed, and in fact early copies of it didn’t include the extra track at all.

Three years later, though, Bruce released an album with a track that was hidden in the truest sense: At the end of the second disc of The Promise, a compilation of Darkness-era outtakes, Bruce appended a song called “The Way” to the album’s final track (“City of Night“) after a twenty-second pause.

Bruce was so determined to hide the song that he didn’t even make it a separate track. Even today, the only way to listen to an official recording of it is to play through the first three minutes or so of “City at Night” until “The Way” kicks in.

“The Way” certainly wasn’t a last-minute recording like “Terry’s Song.” Bruce recorded it with the E Street Band more than three decades earlier.

So why did he bury “The Way” so deeply?

“Because I never liked it!” Bruce laughed during an interview on E Street Radio in 2010.

Bruce knew that fans had a soft spot for the outtake (especially his former producer Jimmy Iovine, who “lobbied for it in ’78 like he was gonna keel over”) thanks to a bootleg version that had been circulating for years, but he thought its proper home would have been “in a David Lynch film over a sexually perverse scene.”

He booted “The Way” off of Darkness on the Edge of Town not long before the album’s release (replacing it with the similarly paced but more dour “Factory“). He rejected it from Tracks in 1998. He even scratched it from the bonus disc that came with The Essential Bruce Springsteen in 2003, after initially slotting it in the leadoff position.

Perhaps sensing the fan uproar that would have ensued had he left it off his definitive Darkness outtake collection in 2010 (or simply the tongue-lashing he would have and did receive from Iovine, who called Bruce up after The Promise was released, only to be playfully chided for not listening to the album all the way through), Bruce finally relented and let his long locked-away creation out into the world.

After all that, one would expect that “The Way” would be a genuine stinker. But it’s not–in fact, it’s a quite lovely ode to romantic fidelity. Well, for the first half of the song, at least. It takes a turn for the strange at the instrumental break, as we’ll see in a moment.

Let’s take a close listen:

The way your heart beats when I hold you tight
The way you sigh when we kiss goodnight
The way the wind blows through the trees
Well hey, that’s the way you belong to me

The way you warm me baby when I’m cold
The way you make me want you body and soul
The way the rivers run to the sea
Well hey, that’s the way you belong to me

The way you soothe me when I’m in pain
The way you make the blood rush in my veins
The way the winds rush through the trees
Well hey, that’s the way you belong to me

When I lose faith you take my hand
The way you make me feel like I’m a man
The way the sun belongs to the sea
Well hey, that’s the way you belong to me

So far, so good. Bruce has constructed a song entirely of comparisons of his narrator’s love with the most natural, reliable, and romantic constants in his life.

All the while, the E Street Band provides gradual and stately accompaniment, building in power through the third verse as our narrator’s comparisons grow increasingly passionate. It’s only when the song takes a moment to breathe through Clarence’s warm solo that we realize that we’re four verses in and our narrator has yet to talk about the way he loves her.

And with that realization, the song starts to get a little bit creepy:

The way you make me feel like I belong
And if I could girl though I know it’d be wrong
I’d lock you deep inside ’till the last rains fall
And hide you from the emptiness of it all

Wait, what? Who wants to lock their lover away from the world until the end of time? Suddenly Bruce’s David Lynch comment seems like not that much of an imaginative stretch.

Bruce reels us back into less questionable territory for the final verse, which includes a couplet that would someday appear in a song that he’d think much more highly of:

Sometimes at night I lie awake
I pull you close and feel each breath you take
The way the rivers belong to the seas
Well hey, that’s the way you belong to me

Setting aside the narrator’s self-centeredness and borderline obsession, “The Way” is a sweet little song that doesn’t seem deserving of its creator’s scorn. It’s easy to hear why it was left off of Darkness on the Edge of Town, though: it takes a close listen to discern the darkness lurking on the song’s periphery. (It’s there, though.)

Most listeners would have probably heard it as a sweet romantic pledge that would have become a wedding dance standard. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but that’s definitely not what Bruce was aiming for with that particular album.

Given Bruce’s distaste for the song, it’s not surprising that he hasn’t played “The Way” in concert. With Bruce, we’ve learned to never say never, but I’d lay very long odds against us hearing this one live.

The Way
Recorded: August 1977 – February 1978
Released: The Promise (2010)
Never performed 

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