The father comes to be near his son. He digs through the smoking steel with a small Army pick and shovel. ”Where are you, boy?” he asks. It has been the same routine for months.
— Charlie Leduff, “Still Digging for Lost Sons After a Million Tons of Pain,” New York Times, January 8, 2002
In the aftermath of September 11th, 2001, a community of retired police officers and firefighters spent months on end searching for their friends and family in the rubble of the World Trade Center.
Because they’d spent their careers as first responders, they were afforded the privilege of being the ones to discover the remains of their sons and daughters.
For months, they breathed the ash and smoke and sifted through the smoldering debris, hoping to find some semblance of closure, if not peace. “They say the worst thing in life is having to bury a child,” wrote New York Times reporter Charlie Leduff. “Worse, the fathers of ground zero say, is not being able to find that child.”
Bruce Springsteen undoubtedly read that story, or some of the many others just like it, and he wrote a song about it for his upcoming album The Rising.
“Down in the Hole” never made the album, though, because it was too thematically similar to another track he’d written and recorded. “Sometimes you end up with a choice between two things that you like a lot,” Bruce told Rolling Stone interviewer Andy Greene, “and I think I had maybe that and ‘Empty Sky.’ The Rising had fifteen songs on it and it felt long enough.”
So “Down in the Hole” became one of only two known outtakes from The Rising, unknown and unreferenced until Bruce released it without fanfare on his 2014 studio album, High Hopes. “That’s basically as it was written and mixed at that time by Brendan [O’Brien].” Bruce explained to Greene. “That’s sort of very original.”
Original indeed. Other than the addition of some 2013 overdubs, what we hear on the High Hopes track is essentially the original 2002 recording, right down to the spectral backing vocals by the entire Springsteen family, including twelve-year-old Evan, eleven-year-old Jessica, and eight-year old Sam.
It’s understandable why Bruce decided only one of “Empty Sky” or “Down in the Hole” should appear on The Rising. It’s debatable whether he chose the right song. Both are poignant and powerful (we’ll examine “Empty Sky” sometime in the next year), but “Down in the Hole” is downright brutal.
Once Max Weinberg’s drums enter in the second verse, the song’s musical skeleton is reminiscent of “I’m on Fire,” but it rides on top of an urban soundscape of simulated heavy machinery and a rural, almost bluegrass-inflected banjo. It’s disorienting and unsettling, intentionally so.
Our narrator is one of the many retired officers or firefighters searching for a loved one, and Bruce’s lyrics are universal enough for it to apply to a lover, a child, a parent, or a friend.
Sun comes every morning but it ain’t no friend
I get dressed and I go back again
The rain it keeps on falling on twisted bones and dirt
I’m buried to my heart here in this hurt
Fire keeps on burning, you’re waiting in the cold
Down in the hole
Maybe it’s Day 10; perhaps it’s Day 100. We can’t tell, and neither can our narrator. Time blurs, one day fades into the next. “They have come for so many days on end,” writes Leduff, “one melting into the next, that their sense of the calendar has been lost entirely… The house goes wanting. Their lives have been taken over.”
Dark and bloody autumn pierces my heart
The memory of your kiss tears me apart
The sky above is turning, the world below’s gone gray
I thought that I could turn and walk away
But the fire keeps on burning, and I’m working in the cold
Down in the hole
“If they found one person… it was a good day. If they find one finger… something was accomplished. But mostly, they are bad days.”
Throughout the first verse of “Down in the Hole” and well into the second, Bruce’s voice is compressed, distant, as if calling from down in a hole himself, or perhaps a long-distance phone call. In the middle of the second verse, though, Bruce’s voice suddenly becomes clear and clean and warm and pure, and the fade effect is startling.
We don’t know exactly what Bruce was going for with the effect, and amusingly neither does he. “I don’t know how it started,” he told Dave Marsh on a 2014 E Street Radio interview. “I’m not sure. I remember doing it with Brendan, and we kind of started the song and did the unusual thing of morphing it from what was a sort of that speaker voice, into the natural vocal tone when the verse comes in. I forgot why we did it!”
Regardless of the reason, it’s effective–it keeps us at a distance and then draws us in. By the time we reach the bridge, we can feel our narrator’s pain as if it were our own.
Radio’s crackling with the headlines, wind in the phone lines
The sun upon your shoulder, empty city skylines
The day rips apart, a dark and bloody arrow pierced my heart
“Down in the Hole” ends without resolution. With the final verse, we leave our narrator to his mission, determined to search without ceasing until he finds his loved ones, promising their ghosts that he will never leave them alone.
I got nothing but hard blue sky and sunshine, the things you left behind
I wake to find my city’s gone to black
The days just keep on falling, your voice it keeps on calling
I’m gonna dig right here until I get you back
Fires keep on burning, I’m here with you in the cold
Down in the hole
Down in the Hole
Recorded: 2002, 2013
Released: High Hopes (2014)
Never performed
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