A great chef can take a few ingredients and use them to create any number of wonderful dishes.\u00a0So why shouldn’t the same be true for songwriters?<\/p>\n
Hardcore Springsteen fans are well aware of Bruce’s penchant for recycling lyrics and music; it stems from his practice of writing lyrics and music independently of each other.<\/p>\n
Verses and sometimes just fragments or phrases will loiter in his notebook for years. Some will eventually make it to one or more demos and studio recordings, most of which will end up in the vault, maybe to be released one day on an outtake collection. Occasionally, we even see snippets of shared DNA between multiple officially released songs (“Further On (Up the Road)” and “Maria’s Bed,” for example).<\/p>\n
And then there’s “Party Lights,” the product of so much Springsteenian in-breeding that it would be a joke–if it wasn’t so darn catchy.<\/p>\n
Buried deep on the outtake disc that accompanies\u00a0The Ties That Bind: The River Collection,\u00a0<\/em>“Party Lights” is two parts “Jersey Girl,” one-and-a-half parts “Point Blank,” and almost<\/em> a heaping dollop of “I Wanna Marry You” before Bruce thought better of it and swapped it for a riff almost certainly influenced by Tom Petty’s “Listen to Her Heart” (released just a year prior).<\/p>\n Check out the official video(!) below:<\/p>\n