The Promise, subtitled The Lost Sessions: Darkness on the Edge of Town, is not the usual odds-and-ends reissue package. In 1975, after Born to Run made him a megastar, Bruce Springsteen found himself in a lawsuit with his then-manager, which blocked the singer from making a follow-up for nearly two years until the suit was settled. While lawyers bickered, Springsteen toured and wrote prolifically. And the album that began taking shape in the months after Born to Run ultimately became — some 70+ songs later — a very different album: 1978’s fierce Darkness on the Edge of Town. As Springsteen himself reflected, “It’s a reckoning with the adult world … with a life of limitations and compromises.”
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