The year was 1980. It was a time of road trips, parties, and high school romances. The soundtrack was Bruce Springsteen: Born to Run, his breakthrough album from 1975 that sold 10 million copies and put him on the front cover of Time. Then Darkness on the Edge of Town which followed three years later, a darker melancholy record that matured into a classic.

I was an exchange student doing my last year of school in a small town in California.  In the middle of the night, at the end of a long summer, at a party of friends who were heading off to college and the rest of their lives, my mate Carl called the local rock station and requested a Springsteen song. They played “Candy’s Room” from Darkness on the Edge of Town.

Since then my musical tastes have changed. We track our lives by our flats and houses, jobs, cities – and of course the music. But for me, Springsteen is still up there. Over four decades he has produced an extraordinary back catalogue of American music. I still love the idiosyncratic early albums (The Wild, The Innocent and the E Street Shuffle, and Greetings from Asbury Park). I drifted away in the 1980s unmoved by Born in the USA and the albums that followed. But kept noticing how he was becoming a modern story teller, writing the lives of ordinary people struggling under the weight of the American dream: dead end jobs, broken loves,  and people going off the rails.

I liked the politics when he sang Woody Guthrie’s This Land is Your Land, performed for Democrat presidential campaigns and spoke out against Republican war-mongering. He paid tribute to John Steinbeck with The Ghost of Tom Joad, a collection of songs updating Steinbeck’s stories of the struggles of migrant farm workers in California.

Back living in the States with my wife and son in 2003 we saw him perform his 9/11 album The Rising in a New York football stadium.  It was a performance that completely connected the time, the place and the people.

So one of the highlights of the holiday season for me has been listening to The Promise, Springsteen’s newly released double album of songs from 1977-78. The recording sessions followed Born to Run, with Springsteen in his mid-20s desperately trying to prove he wasn’t a one hit wonder, and unable to release a record for three years due to a legal fight with his manager. These are the songs that didn’t make it onto Darkness on the Edge of Town but they are more than just out-takes. They include a lush wall-of-sound version of Racing in the Street, and Springsteen songs others made famous, Because the Night (Patti Smith) and Fire (Pointer Sisters) and more magic besides.

Listening to The Promise made me go back to Darkness and listen to it in a new light. It is tougher, leaner and sparser than the songs that were left out. But as Graham Reid writes, listening to The Promise is more than just an insight into the creative process.

…The Promise shows how Springsteen drew on that deep well of Top 40 jukebox music and Brill Building pop but also how that was transformed by maturity, an increasing literary sensibility and an awareness of that hollowness in people’s lives where music was the passport to three minutes of freedom from the grind and darkness of life.