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The following notes, written by Bruce, are taken from the book "Songs".
After Born to Run I wanted to write about life in the close confines of the small towns I grew up in. In 1977 I was living on a farm in Holmdel, New Jersey. It was there that I wrote most of the songs for Darkness on the Edge of Town.
I was twenty-seven and the product of Top 40 radio. Songs like the Animals' "It's My Life" and "We Gotta Get Out of This Place" were infused with an early pop class consciousness. That, along with my own experience - the stress and tension of my father's and mother's life that came with the difficulties of trying to make ends meet - influenced my writing. I had a reaction to my own good fortune. I asked myself new questions. I felt a sense of accountablilty to the people I'd grown up alongside of. I began to wonder how to address that feeling. Also, at that time, I was in a battle with my former manager for the rights and control of my music. I stood the chance of losing much of what I had worked for and accomplished. All of this led to the turn my writing took on Darkness.
I began to listen seriously to country music around this time. I discovered Hank Williams. I liked the fact that country dealt with adult topics, and I wanted to write songs that would resonate down the road. Film, always important to my writing, became an even greater influence on this album. I always liked the flash an outlaws of B pictures - Robert Mitchum in Thunder Road and Arthur Ripley's Gun Crazy. I'd recently seen John Ford's The Grapes of Wrath for the first time. I sought out '40s and '50s film noir such as Jacques Tourneur's Out of the Past. It was the feeling of men and women struggling against a world closing in that drew me to those films. Even the title, Darkness on the Edge of Town, owed a to to American noir.
Musically I wanted the record to sound leaner and less grand than Born to Run. That sound wouldn't suit these songs or the people I was now writing about. Chuck Plotkin, an LA record man, came in near the end of the album and helped us get a tighter, more modern mix. He helped us focus the songs in a way we'd been unable to and allowed us to bring the record to completion. There was a lot of variation in the material we recorded, but I edited out anything I thought broke the album's tension. After Born to Run, I wanted to ensure that my music continued to have value and a sense of place.
The songs were difficult to write. I remember spending hours trying to come up with a single verse. "Badlands," "Prove It All Night," and "Promised Land" all had a chorus but few lyrics. I was searching for a tone somewhere between Born to Run's spiritual hopefulness and '70s cynicism. I wanted my new characters to feel weathered, older, but not beaten. The sense of daily struggle in each song greatly increased. The possibility of transcendence or any sort of personal redemption felt a lot harder to come by. This was the tone I wanted to sustain. I intentionally steered away from any hint of escapism and set my characters down in the middle of a community under siege. Weeks, even months went by, before I had something that felt right.
The songs came together slowly, line by line, piece by piece. The titles were big: "Adam Raised a Cain," "Darkness on the Edge of Town," "Racing in the Street." "Adam Raised a Cain" used biblical images to summon up the love and bitterness between a father and son. "Darkness on the Edge of Town" dealt with the idea that the setting for personal transformation is often found at the end of your rope. In "Racing in the Streets" I wanted my street racers to carry the years between the car songs of the '60s and 1978 America. To make "Racing" and those other big titles personal, I had to infuse the music with my own hopes and fears. If you don't do that, your characters ring hollow, and you're left with rhetoric, words without meaning.
Most of my writing is emotionally autobiographical. You've got to pull up the things that mean something to you in order for them to mean anything to your audience. That's how they know you're not kidding.
With the record's final verse, "Tonight I'll be on that hill ....," my characters stand unsure of their fate, but dug in and committed. By the end of Darkness I'd found my adult voice.