Introduction: "Bruce Springsteen's Darkness on the Edge of Town: Hard Truths in Hard Rock Settings"

As Bruce Springsteen himself put it, "by the end of Darkness, I'd found my adult voice."

After a three-year gap in recording as a result of bitter legal battles with his former manager, Springsteen stands on the threshold of Darkness on the Edge of Town and captures a mood that leads us far from the buoyant era of Born to Run. This new backdrop conveys a working-class environment; reflective of class-driven struggles, tenuous relationships, emotional loss, and escape—where each day the characters often face the harsh complications of just living. It's real, it's honest, and lyrically it's one of his finest moments.

Because Springsteen's songwriting is often emotionally autobiographical—although he maintains that this album is not his personal story—this reflective period in his life and career and his struggles with regret, loss of confidence, and loss of innocence are evident in every song on the LP. It is in every way a transitional album. Springsteen drives away from the beach and boardwalk and into the ethos of the American heartland. During this introspective time, he takes a spontaneous journey to the Badlands, develops a fascination with noir films, and finds himself drawn to both punk and country music. During the LP's productions, he loses one of his most powerful rock inspirations in the form of Elvis Presley, who dies unexpectedly in August 1977. Gone is the idealism, hope, and romance of Springsteen's first three albums. For the first time, the characters in his songs remain unnamed. The weight of adult life had settled into his being and his song lyrics.

Significant changes had also taken place in the recording studio, with Jon Landau firmly at the helm as the album's co-producer, along with Springsteen and Miami Steve Van Zandt. Due to Springsteen's three-year hiatus, he had amassed a large volume of songs for the upcoming Darkness album. With sixty or more songs to consider, the pace of production had suffered as Springsteen agonized over the countless choices. The full Phil Spector wall-of-sound production that was evident in earlier albums made way for stark, guitar-driven riffs, unadulterated solos, and passionate vocals. Springsteen's search for a specific sound led him to shift his recording sessions from New York's Atlantic Studios to California's Record Plant until musically and sonically the album was at last completed in March 1978 and released on June 2, 1978. The final result was a stunning success, a perfectly sequenced and landmark recording in music history. To date, Darkness on the Edge of Town has achieved triple-platinum status; and, in 2010, a triple CD box set The Promise was released that featured twenty-two previously unreleased tracks and a film by Thom Zimny documenting the Darkness sessions.

While listeners won't find a pop hit on this epic album, Darkness on the Edge of Town exists, some forty years later, as a staggering emotional and sociocultural statement, a place where the Promised Land is both supremely possible and a windswept dream. The essayists in this special issue take great pains to assess the record's impact some four decades later, as well as to explore the overarching sociopolitical issues that distinguish it from the other albums of its day. In "No Surrender: Bruce Springsteen, Neoliberalism, and Rock and Roll's Fantasy of Sovereign Rebellion," Kaitlin N. Graves addresses the songwriter's unabashed neoliberal tendencies, along with the mythical, rebellious figure at the heart of his corpus. In "Women Fans' Journeys through Darkness," Lorraine Mangione and Donna Luff discuss female fan perspectives through Springsteen's often highly masculinized musical terrain.

Meanwhile, Veronika Hermann's "Runaway American Dream: Nostalgia, Figurative Memory, and Autofiction in Stories of Born to Run" examines the coterie of characters living at the heart of Springsteen's stories, especially regarding the signal role of nostalgia as the songwriter's literary lens.

Gavin Cologne-Brookes's "Try to Make It Real: A Bruce on Broadway...