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Surely recognizing this deficit, Springsteen spent roughly another year in the studio, reviving old songs and writing new ones, arriving at full-blown, completed recordings of most of these tunes, then picking and choosing from his surplus to create the final album. It reiterates many of the themes of Darkness, only without aggression, fury, or precision, the very things that give that record a lift that fights against its undercurrents of hopelessness.

WhatвЂ™s striking is whatвЂ™s absent: shorn of its party songs, the record feels gloomy and haunted-even 'You Can Look (But You Better Not Touch)' in a lonesome Sun rockabilly incarnation feels like a transmission from the lonely black of night. I wanted to keep those characters with me and at the same time added the music that made our live shows so much fun and enjoyable for our audience.' On this box, the scrapped The Ties That Bind gets an official airing as the third disc on the set-here itвЂ™s dubbed The River -and it does indeed play like a truncated, miniature version of The River, containing in its 10 tracks seven of the double-albumвЂ™s songs, along with two alternate versions of tunes that wound up on the released record.

Initially, Springsteen planned to follow 1978вЂ™s Darkness on the Edge of Town with an album called The Ties That Bind but he withdrew the record in the fall of 1979, believing that it wasnвЂ™t 'big enough.' This claim came from the stage during a 2009 performance of The River at Madison Square Garden, with Bruce going on to say, 'I wanted to capture the themes that IвЂ™d been writing about on Darkness.

Original photo for madvillainy album cover