On The Tracks

A studio guide to Bruce Springsteen

Welcome to On The Tracks, which will hopefully become a definitive guide to Bruce songs through their not inconsiderable history. These pages concentrate on studio recordings, both official releases and unreleased out-takes and demos.
A guide to the available studio bootlegs is also available: A guide to Studio Bootlegs.

PLEASE NOTE - THIS SECTION IS ALWAYS UNDER CONSTRUCTION!!!
This is always a working document and any other information or queries (or contradictions) are very welcome - E mail us directly at brucebase with any information that is relevant.


The tracks are laid out in a timeline with all the out-takes and alternate versions credited with a source recording - if it is available. The officially released version timings are of course sourced from the CDs but the timings are actual and not what would necessarily appear on the CD track time display. Wherever possible the other track times are sourced from CD, then LP and finally tape - there are two main reasons for this

  1. CDs are easier to use
  2. More importantly, as long as the source material on the CD was running at the right speed (which is not always the case with the un-official sources) it will remain accurate. Tape speeds vary considerably from deck to deck, and therefore the more a tape is dubbed, or depending on the tape deck used, the greater the potential for speed variation. This accounts for what could be considered major time differentials in exactly the same track in many cases.

All tracks are timed for music - count in times (unless they are embedded in the intro) are not included and the chatter that accompanies many outtakes is also not timed.

The KEY details the shortened source reference in the Details. The Timeline shows a chronological listing of recordings sessions. On the Details-section of each studio session we list the songs that have been recorded during that sessions period. To avoid any confusion, the order of this listing is alphabetically.

Additional information, usually cribbed from any source material we can get our hands on will be included where appropriate on each track.

Where no timing or source is detailed it means either that we know it exists and haven't got it or that we haven't got round to doing the analysis on the different versions (if any) as yet.

New source material is surfacing all the time so these pages will (we do our best) never be complete - only as up to date as possible for instance we still have to hear/get our hands on 'Electric Nebraska' or the missing demos from Born To Run or Tunnel or……. well it goes on and on. New releases often have received some modern elements not available on the original recordings, we try to document these new elements as good as possible.

There are a great many other Bruce song titles which are known but we have only included information or reference to them where they are known to exist on a tape source somewhere. Many songs referred to in other works were either never recorded or are never likely to surface. These songs however are listed in their own section of the studio session.


Special Thanks

We do not make a habit to pay credit to everybody who contributes to the site with information, or other help. Therefore we'd like to use this section to do that in general. First of all former Brucebase administrator Pete Russell, and longtime contributor Johnny Savage. Also Eddy Wehbe, Dave and Pete for working together, Discogs, AllMusic, and Wikipedia for the extra details, and the support of the many contributors on BTX, SPL, Hoffman Music Forums and Greasy Lake for helping to identify key issues. Other people that definitely need to be praised are authors like Clinton Heylin, Peter Ames Carlin, but also people, like Albee Tellone, that have worked with Springsteen either in or outside the studio, or as part of his management team (like Jon Landau, Barbara Carr), and Sony Music.


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