JANEY NEEDS A SHOOTER

Album version

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Well Janey's got a doctor who tears apart her insides
He investigates her and silently baits her sighs
He probes with his fingers but knows her heart only through his stethoscope
His hands are cold and his body's so old
Janey turns him down like dope

Janey needs a shooter now
A shooter like me on her side
Janey needs a shooter now
A shooter man who knows her style
The way that I know her style

Well Janey's got a priest from his marble pulpit he smiles
He provides consolation and he hears her confession at any time
In the pages of his bible he holds from what Janey hides
And with her doors open wide she begs, "Come inside"
But he's been frozen so long on the outside

Janey needs a shooter now
A shooter like me on her side
Janey needs a shooter now
A shooter man who knows her style
The way that I know her style

Well Janey's got a cop who lives 'round the block and checks on her every night
And her skin would turn pale as the siren he'd wail outside when he knew I was inside
Janey's small and sometimes he scared her
So I held her real close, she was more saint than a ghost
And told her I so long had been prepared for her

Janey needs a shooter now
A shooter like me on her side
Janey needs a shooter now
A shooter man who knows her style
Janey needs a shooter now
A shooter like me on her side
Janey needs a shooter now
A shooter man who knows her style
The way that I know her style
A man who knows her style
The way that I know her style
A man who knows her style
The way that I know her style
A man who knows her style
The way that I know her style
A man who knows her style
The way that I know her style
A man who knows her style
The way that I know her style
A man who knows her style
The way that I know her style

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Info

JANEY NEEDS A SHOOTER is a song written by Bruce Springsteen and released on his 2020 album Letter To You. The above lyrics are for Bruce Springsteen's album version of JANEY NEEDS A SHOOTER as released in 2020.

Writing and Recording

Bruce Springsteen wrote JANEY NEEDS A SHOOTER in 1972, but the melody was culled from his 1971 song TALKING ABOUT MY BABY.

1972 was a massive songwriting period for Bruce Springsteen. Following the completion of his debut album sessions in October 1972, he continued composing new material. JANEY NEEDS A SHOOTER probably saw the light during that period. According to Brucebase, Springsteen was allegedly supplied with a reel-to-reel recorder by Mike Appel (Springsteen's former manager) and Jim Cretecos (Springsteen's former co-manager) and is thought to have made some home demos on his own during this period. None of that home-recorded audio has ever emerged.

Prior to its official release in 2020, one studio version, two home demos, and one band rehearsal takes of the song were in circulation among collectors.

According to Sony's logs of Bruce Springsteen's studio sessions, JANEY NEEDS A SHOOTER is among five songs that were recorded on 29-30 Jan 1973 at 914 Sound Studios in Blauvelt, NY. These were studio demo sessions. They were produced by Mike Appel and Jim Cretecos and engineered by Louis Lahav. A solo piano take of JANEY NEEDS A SHOOTER is in circulation among collectors and it most likely emanates from these 29-30 Jan 1973 sessions. See the unofficial studio version for more details.

Two solo acoustic demos of JANEY NEEDS A SHOOTER, recorded at Springsteen's home in Holmdel, NJ, sometime between January and June 1979, are also in circulation among collectors. They are just song fragments, both musically and lyrically. See home demo version 1 and home demo version 2 for more details.

A band rehearsal take of JANEY NEEDS A SHOOTER, recorded in late May 1979 at Springsteen's Telegraph Hill Road property in Holmdel, NJ, is also in circulation among collectors. See the band rehearsal version for more details.

The album version of JANEY NEEDS A SHOOTER, from which the above lyrics are transcribed, is likely the first track that was cut for the Letter To You album. There is some confusion about when exactly it was recorded. First, the song does not appear in the Bruce Springsteen's Letter To You film, which documents the 11-15 Nov 2020 sessions. Second, in several of the many interviews he gave to promote the album, Springsteen said that JANEY NEEDS A SHOOTER was recorded for a Record Store Day release. In some of those interviews, he alluded that the song was recorded before the Letter To You sessions. In some others, he alluded that it was the first track cut during the Letter To You sessions, but was originally intended for a Record Store Day release before deciding to keep it for the album.

Interview with NPR's Steve Inskeep:

I cut a song on the record called "Janey Needs A Shooter" earlier on, for like a one-off, for like a Record Store Day. But when I listened back to it, it was the closest thing the band had ever sounded to Darkness On The Edge Of Town. [...] That was because we all played together and sang at one time, and because we relied only on the instrumentation of the band and no overdubs. So I said, well, I'd be interested in making a record where we, where we return to sort of the template of Darkness On The Edge Of Town using only the instrumentation of the band and recording all at once.

Interview with E Street radio's's Jim Rotolo:

I cut "Janey Needs A Shooter" as a single piece for what I thought was going to be a Record Store Day release here in the United States. But it ended up sounding so good, I said, "That sounds like an album cut." And so I just held onto it. And, uh, then one thing led to another, and "If I Were A Priest" and "Song For Orphans" came around. So, it was all sorts of happy accidents happening all over the place.

Interview with Asbury Park Press' Chris Jordan:

I guess I came across [the old songs] when I was working on a Tracks 2 and I said these three songs are interesting, maybe I'd like to hear the band play them. Because we cut one by accident for a Record Store Day. We cut "Janey Needs A Shooter" and then when I went behind the board and heard it I said we can't give this way, this is part of an album. It was the first cut we did for Letter To You and after that I said maybe there's a few others that would take the same sort of treatment so I found a couple of others that I liked and we just played those and they came out great, you know? The combination of the lyrics from the day and melodies from the day and the energy and maturity of the band from now, turned into a nice thing.

"When [Springsteen] presented 'Janey' [to the band], in my head it was 1977 so I played like it was 1977 − but better," Max Weinberg told Uncut's Peter Watts. "For Letter To You we had largely the same individuals who had spent hundreds of hours in the '70s figuring out how to do this thing. So when presented with a song of the era of Darkness On The Edge Of Town − musically and in your mind you can go back there. There are many threads in Bruce's music and we were there for a lot of the sewing."

Consideration for Release

In his 1989 book Backstreets: Springsteen, The Man And His Music, Charles R. Cross mentions a list of songs titled "New Album #3" that Springsteen wrote when he "first planned the third record." The list seems to emanate from very early in the Born To Run recording sessions, which started in January 1974. Among the nine songs in the list is JANEY NEEDS A SHOOTER.

A set of two untitled lists, one containing 8 tracks and one containing 11, was auctioned online in July 2019. Springsteen wrote the two lists on an 8.25x6-inch piece of a lined notebook page using multiple ballpoint pens. He wrote the recording times next to the tracks, which means that they were already recorded in studio. This, and the fact that the three songs added to the second list using different pens were recorded late in the Born To Run sessions, indicates that these two lists likely date from around Spring 1975. Springsteen listed a song JANEY NEEDS A SHOOTER as the fourth track on the second list with running time of 4:30.

Letter To You

Letter To You is Bruce Springsteen's twentieth studio album. It was officially released on 23 Oct 2020 on Columbia Records. It consists of 12 tracks, all written by Springsteen, and clocks at 58:17. The album was officially announced on 10 Sep 2020. In the press release, it was described as "a rock album fueled by the band's heart-stopping, house-rocking signature sound."

Three of the album's twelve tracks are new recordings of unreleased songs that Springsteen wrote in the early seventies. The remaining nine were "recently written," as per the album's press release. On 05 May 2019, during the opening night of Netflix's third annual FYSEE event in Los Angeles, Springsteen sat down for a long conversation with director Martin Scorsese. "I've spent about seven years without writing anything for the band," Springsteen told Scorsese at one point. "I couldn't write anything for the band. [...] And then about a month or so ago, I wrote almost an album's worth of material for the band. And it came out of just... I mean, I know where it came from, but at the same time, it just came out of almost nowhere. And it was good, you know. I had about two weeks of those little daily visitations, and it was so nice. It makes you so happy."

In 2017 or 2018, when Springsteen was coming out from one of his Springsteen On Broadway shows, a young fan, from Italy Springsteen thinks, handed him an acoustic guitar. As Springsteen recounted to AARP's Robert Love, the fan told him, "Hey, Bruce, this is for you. We had this built for you. It's very special." The guitar had no case and was made by a company that Springsteen never heard of. "I said, 'Geez, you know, thanks,'" Springsteen told Rolling Stone's Brian Hiatt. "And I just took a quick glance at it and it looked like a nice guitar, so I jumped in the car with it." The Rolling Stone article and the AARP article give two conflicting timelines as to when Springsteen was gifted the guitar. This took place "sometime before Theiss' passing" according to the former and "shortly after Theiss' death" according to the latter. The Springsteen On Broadway concert residency officially opened on 12 Oct 2017 and ran through 15 Dec 2018. Former Castiles member George Theiss passed away on 13 Jul 2018.

The guitar ended up sitting in Springsteen's living room for months, until he picked it up around April 2019. "All the [new] songs from the album came out of it," Springsteen told Rolling Stone's Brian Hiatt. "In perhaps less than 10 days. I just wandered around the house in different rooms, and I wrote a song each day. I wrote a song in the bedroom. I wrote a song in our bar. I wrote a song in the living room." "Sometimes instruments have some magic in them," Springsteen told AARP's Robert Love. "The songs for the album were in the guitar that the kid gave me. You try for seven years and you write an album in a week." However, at least three songs were written or partially written at least 15 years earlier. These are ONE MINUTE YOU'RE HERE, BURNIN' TRAIN, and RAINMAKER.

Soon after he wrote the new songs, sometime during summer 2018 as Roy Bittan remembers, Springsteen met Bittan for lunch in New York City while he was performing on Broadway. "He said, 'I wrote a whole bunch of songs for E Street,'" Bittan told Uncut's Peter Watts. "He said, 'Yeah, I did it in about two weeks.' That wasn't the first time he had done something in a quick burst, but I was taken aback as he had been so involved with the Broadway show, the book, and this Western Stars project had been on and off for years. To hear that in the middle of all this he had written a bunch of E Street songs was terribly exciting. So the first thing I said was, 'Great, now don't demo them.' Because when you demo, it's carved in stone. Then you have to play 'beat the demo'." Springsteen knew that Bittan was right. "When I demo, I start putting things on to see if it works," he told Hiatt. "And suddenly, I'm locked into an arrangement. And then the band has to fit themselves into an arrangement. And suddenly, we don't have an E Street Band album. So I intentionally did not demo anything." Springsteen did not touch the songs before he taught them to the band during the recording sessions. He simply played them solo acoustic and captured them on his iPhone just to make sure he remembered them.

According to Rolling Stone's Brian Hiatt, Roy Bittan's advice had deep implications for Letter To You and echoed what Steven Van Zandt had been telling Springsteen for years. "We have an ongoing conversation and one of the regular topics is that if we do make another record, let's do it the old way," Van Zandt told Uncut. "The old way" is how Darkness On The Edge Of Town, The River, and Born In The U.S.A. were recorded. "Bruce walks in with an acoustic guitar, plays his songs and everybody has a chance to give their input," Van Zandt told Forbes' Steve Baltin. "The great thing about the E Street Band is they really do produce themselves." Until 1984, as Uncut's Peter Watts put it, "Van Zandt had acted as something like a conduit ― or consigliere ― between Springsteen and the rest of the group." But after his departure from the E Street Band following the recording of Born In The U.S.A., Springsteen's albums stopped being recorded live in studio. On some recordings Springsteen handled all or almost all instruments or musicians recorded their parts separately ― sometimes in different studios around the country ― and producers and engineers assembled the recordings to make up the final songs. Letter To You would be different.

In 2019, while working through his archives for a follow-up to his 1998 Tracks box set, Springsteen came across JANEY NEEDS A SHOOTER, IF I WAS THE PRIEST, and SONG FOR ORPHANS. He decided to record them again for Letter To You. He told The New York Times' Lindsay Zoladz: "It's fun to go back and see how wild my lyric writing was, and how uninhibited it was at a certain moment, and to be able to take that and bring it into the present with the band, and sing it in my voice right now, was a bit of a joy ride. The thing about those songs, every line is insane! And somehow they end up making sense about something. I'm not sure how I did it at the time."

Springsteen has long had recording facilities set up at different properties he owns or owned at some point in the United States. These were named "Thrill Hill Recording", or sometimes referred to as "Thrill Hill East" or "Thrill Hill West" depending on whether it's on the East Coast or on the West Coast. In 2009, he set up Stone Hill Studio, a permanent recording facility at Stone Hill Farm, his horse ranch in Colts Neck, NJ. Letter To You was recorded at Stone Hill Studio and all or almost all of the songs on the album were cut between 11 and 15 Nov 2019. Springsteen told The New York Times' Lindsay Zoladz: "My blueprint for what I was doing was basically the two songs that we'd done in the past that were cut completely live, 'Darkness On The Edge Of Town' and 'Born In The U.S.A.,' which is like two takes." "We basically cut the album in four days," Steven Van Zandt told Rolling Stone's Brian Hiatt. "We booked five days and on the fifth day we had nothing to do, so we just listened to it." There were some discussions that Springsteen and the band reconvene later that year or early in 2020 to record more material, but Springsteen felt he had enough for the album.

The band had not heard the songs they were going to record when they arrived in studio. Springsteen had a stack of maybe as many as 15 songs according to Uncut's Peter Watts. Springsteen would first play a song for them on acoustic guitar while they listened and noted chord changes, each writing down a preliminary arrangement, and then they all contributed ideas and discussed the arrangement. Then they played the song live, making further alterations until they were satisfied with the take. Then the same process starts all over with the next song and so on until the album was finished. Each song was completed within half-a-dozen tries. "It's natural, organic with a lot of improvisation but within the structure of the written song," Nils Lofgren told Uncut's Peter Watts. "You aren't just trying to place your part on a great track, you are all there together. It's interactive and you have to focus and adapt to what the others are doing. [...] We had no preconceived notions or parts to chase. We'd just start from scratch." "Sometimes [Springsteen will] give us the cue but we have freedom to try things and use our instincts," Charles Giordano told Watts. "He'll let us know if he doesn't like it and is very good at letting us know what he appreciates."

Letter To You marks the first time that Bruce Springsteen and The E Street Band recorded an album together as a unit since Born In The U.S.A.. As Springsteen explained to AARP's Robert Love, "[the album] was all live, no overdub vocals and just a few overdub instruments. It's the first truly live, in-the-studio record of the band we've ever made." According to Rolling Stone's Brian Hiatt, "a few of Springsteen's twangy guitar leads, played on a Gretsch, are among the only exceptions." Jake Clemons came in on the fifth day to overdub his saxophone parts.

Letter To You was produced by Ron Aniello with Springsteen, mixed by Bob Clearmountain, and mastered by Bob Ludwig. Springsteen (lead vocals, guitar, harmonica) is joined on the album by Steven Van Zandt (guitar, backing vocals), Nils Lofgren (guitar, backing vocals), Charles Giordano (organ, backing vocals), Roy Bittan (piano, backing vocals), Garry Tallent (bass guitar, backing vocals), Max Weinberg (drums, backing vocals), Jake Clemons (saxophone), and Patti Scialfa (backing vocals). The album is available as a single-disc CD and as a two-disc LP set, as well as digital download and streaming. Three editions of the vinyl release were issued: a regular edition on black vinyl, a limited edition on black with white splatter vinyl exclusive to Bruce Springsteen's official webstore, and a limited edition on gray vinyl exclusive to independent retailers.

Letter To You topped the charts in many countries. In the United States, it debuted and peaked at number 2. This makes it Springsteen's 21st U.S. top 5 album. It also makes Springsteen the first act with new top five-charting albums in each of the last six decades.

Live History

As far as it's known, Bruce Springsteen has never performed JANEY NEEDS A SHOOTER live.

Covers

At least one artist has recorded and released Bruce Springsteen's JANEY NEEDS A SHOOTER.

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Available Versions

List of available versions of JANEY NEEDS A SHOOTER on this website:

JANEY NEEDS A SHOOTER [Album version]
JANEY NEEDS A SHOOTER [Unofficial studio version]
JANEY NEEDS A SHOOTER [Home demo version 1]
JANEY NEEDS A SHOOTER [Home demo version 2]
JANEY NEEDS A SHOOTER [Band rehearsal version]

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Page last updated: 30 Oct 2020