Remember the days when years would go by between Bruce’s album releases?<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
But starting in 2005, the floodgates opened. Bruce released six albums in ten years, and toured behind them for eight of those years.<\/p>\n
By 2013, he wouldn’t even wait until the post-tour downtime to get back in the studio; Bruce\u00a0 recorded High Hopes<\/em> while still on the road touring behind Wrecking Ball.<\/em><\/p>\n And then while on tour for\u00a0High Hopes,\u00a0<\/em>Bruce did something previously unimaginable: he released an EP of songs that didn’t make the album.<\/p>\n It wasn’t the first time Bruce had released outtakes, of course. We had the 1998\u00a0Tracks<\/em> box set and in 2011, The Promise<\/em>. But those collections were carefully curated, sequenced, and painstakingly presented.<\/p>\n By contrast, American Beauty<\/em> 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.<\/p>\n 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.\u00a0<\/em>They almost certainly were. (I suspect Bruce wrote and recorded his demo for “Hurry Up Sundown” during the Magic\/Working on a Dream\u00a0<\/em>sessions that yielded a similar vein of power pop melodies.)<\/p>\n Bruce has admitted that each of the tracks on\u00a0American Beauty\u00a0<\/em>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.<\/p>\n