http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WUQ9YjByMyw
Bruce Springsteen’s prolific nature as a songwriter has often been at odds with his meticulous attitude towards constructing an album, and while Springsteen is known to regularly feature new songs in concert, that doesn’t mean that they’re necessarily going to appear on his next album. “Don’t Look Back” was a song that first began popping up in Springsteen’ s live sets during his three-year lawsuit-motivated recording layoff between Born To Run and Darkness On The Edge Of Town, and along with “The Promise”, another tune that first appeared around this time, the song quickly achieved a near-legendary status among Springsteen fans. However, when Darkness On The Edge Of Town was finally released in 1978, neither song made it into the final sequence. In the case of “The Promise”, as strong as the song was, it also summed up the themes of the album so well that it would likely have seemed almost redundant in context, or made the rest of the album seem superfluous. The trouble with “Don’t Look Back” was a bit trickier; a song of uncommon passion from one of the most fiery performers in rock, “Don’t Look Back” was a tale of defiance against long odds and all but hopeless circumstances, and was cut from the same cloth as Darkness’s two side-openers, “Badlands” and “The Promised Land”. However, while “Don’t Look Back” was as good if not better than either of those songs, it lacked the anthemic quality that made “Badlands” a great overture, as well as the hard-won optimism that “The Promised Land” brought to the disc at a crucial moment in its sequence. In short, “Don’t Look Back” was a superb song that didn’t quite fit Darkness On The Edge Of Town, even though it was so strongly of a piece with the album’s other songs, and while Springsteen and The E-Street Band cut a crackling version of it during the Darkness sessions, the recording first reached fans on a bootleg album called Don’t Look Back (which also featured a live take of “The Promise”, as well as the long-unreleased Three Mile Island protest number “Roulette”). However, in 1998 “Don’t Look Back” finally gained an authorized release when it closed out the first disc of Springsteen’s ambitious box set of “songs that got away”, Tracks.
The Fat Angel Sings 