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As I was exercising this morning I put on “The Promise”, Bruce Springsteen‘s resurrection of a lot of material recorded 30 years ago during the “Darkness on the Edge of Town” sessions. Many of the songs haven’t been heard before. Some were hits for others (“Talk To Me”, “Because The Night”), and others were concert faves (“Rendezvous”) even though they hadn’t been formally relased. You could also hear how some of these songs became others – the most obvious is “Racing In The Street” but besides a lyric change a few of these songs did make it in a different form on to “Darkness.”
The quality of this material raises the obvious question: why has it taken 30 years and why didn’t it go on the original record 30 years ago? And that’s the business lesson from Burce today.
It’s no secret that everyone here at Rancho Deluxe is a die-hard Bruce fan so it’s no surpise that I love the disc. I saw a documentary about it on HBO a while back in which Bruce explained that although he knew he could have made a double record at the time without lowering the quality he felt that the songs he left out didn’t go with the narrative of the record. At his heart, Bruce is a story-teller, a griot. These aren’t outtakes either – it’s a full-blown CD of high-quality material which, as Bruce says, was more genre-based than what he wanted for the story told in “Darkness.” So he left them on the shelf.
And that’s the point. How many of us put something out just because we can? The best example in my mind is software with “feature bloat” – 100 things that no one ever uses (MS Word) but I’m sure you can think of features on your car, your TV, or maybe even the computer you’re using to read this that just complicate things and detract from the narrative.
Keeping our products focused – sticking to our core competencies – is important. Funny how we learn that lesson from Bruce – maybe that’s why he’s The Boss!
Consult Keith 