LOOSE ENDS

Official studio version

We met out on open streets when we had no place to go
I remember how my heart beat when you said "I love you so"
Then little by little we choked out all the life that our love could hold
No no

It's like we had a noose and baby without check
We pulled 'til it grew tighter around our necks
Each one waiting for the other, darling to say when
Well baby you can meet me tonight on the loose end

We didn't count tomorrows, we took what we could and baby we ran
There was no time for sorrow, every place we went I held your hand
And when the night closed in I was sure your kisses told me all I had to know
But oh no

It's like we had a noose and baby without check
We pulled until it grew tighter around our necks
Each one waiting for the other, darling to say when
Well baby you can meet me tonight on the loose end

Whoa

Our love has fallen around us like we said it never could
We saw it happen to all the others but to us it never would
Well how could something so bad, darling, come from something that was so good
I don't know

It's like we had a noose and baby without check
We pulled 'til it grew tighter around our necks
Each one waiting for the other, darling to say when
Well baby you can meet me tonight on the loose end
On the loose end
On the loose end
On the loose end (on the loose end)
On the loose end
On the loose end
On the loose end (on the loose end)
On the loose end
On the loose end

PAGE UNDER CONSTRUCTION

Info

LOOSE ENDS is a song written by Bruce Springsteen and first released on the Tracks box set in 1998. The above lyrics are for Bruce Springsteen's official studio version of LOOSE ENDS as released in 1998.

The official studio version of LOOSE ENDS was also included on the 18 Tracks compilation in 1999 and in an alternate mix on The Ties That Bind: The River Collection box set in 2015.

This official studio version of LOOSE ENDS (the alternate mix) was planned for release on Springsteen's 1979 album had it seen the light. See "The Ties That Bind" section below for more details.

LOOSE ENDS is among 25 songs compiled for a 1993 project that never came to fruition. See the "1993 Concept Album" section below for more details.

Studio Recording

According to both the Tracks liner notes and Sony's logs of Bruce Springsteen's studio sessions, LOOSE ENDS was recorded on 18 Jul 1979 at The Power Station in New York City, NY. Two studio takes of LOOSE ENDS have surfaced. The official studio version, which was first released in 1998, was recorded during the 18 Jul 1979 session at The Power Station as per the Tracks liner notes. However, on The Power Station reel-to-reel tapes (see "The Ties That Bind" section below), LOOSE ENDS is marked as take #2 from 23 Sep 1979. That date is most likely for a mixing or overdub session.

The unofficial studio version, which is an earlier version, may have been recorded during the same 18 Jul 1979 session, or possibly earlier, though no other recording date for the song is listed in Sony's studio logs.

Two mixes of the official studio version of LOOS ENDS were released. The above lyrics match the mix found on Tracks, while the one on The Ties That Bind: The River Collection does not include the parts in bold.

The Ties That Bind

Bruce Springsteen wrapped up the Darkness On The Edge Of Town Tour on the first day of 1979. For the next few months, he altered between composing and practicing solo demos at his home in Holmdel, NJ (between January and June 1979), rehearsing with the band at his Telegraph Hill Road property in Holmdel, NJ (between March and May 1979), and recording in studio at The Power Station in New York City, NY (from late March to late August 1979).

By early August 1979, enough quality material had been recorded at The Power Station. According to The Ties That Bind documentary, a total of twenty-four songs had been recorded. According to Clinton Heylin's 2012 book It was looking like Springsteen's fifth album might be released in Christmas 1979. E Street Shuffle: The Glory Days of Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band, Springsteen's initial track sequence for the album was as follows:

By mid-September 1979, Springsteen replaced RICKY WANTS A MAN OF HER OWN, LOOSE ENDS, and THE MAN WHO GOT AWAY by CINDY and THE RIVER. Soon after, he removed RAMROD, restored LOOSE ENDS, and added YOU CAN LOOK (BUT YOU BETTER NOT TOUCH). A title, "The Ties That Bind", was selected for the album and wheels put in motion to produce artwork for the cover. Around September, at least ten tracks were mixed to completion. On 04 Oct 1979, the ten selected tracks were dubbed to two half-track reel-to-reel tapes at The Power Station, and labeled "side one" and "side two". As written on the reels, the producer was Jon Landau and the engineers were Neil Dorfsman and Bob Clearmountain, assisted by Jeff Hendrickson. The new track sequence for the album was as follows:

Bruce Springsteen -- The Ties That Bind (reel #1, front)

Bruce Springsteen -- The Ties That Bind (reel #2, front)

Mock covers with "The Ties That Bind" title were roughed out early in the planning. The cover shot was to be a picture of Bruce Springsteen in front of a barn, with the back cover being a shot of his face behind a screen door. In late September 1979, The Ties That Bind single album was scrapped as Springsteen's writing process continued.

1993 Concept Album

In his 2012 book E Street Shuffle: The Glory Days Of Bruce Springsteen & The E Street Band, Clinton Heylin revealed that in 1993 a 25-song compilation was produced for an archival project, which presumably became the Tracks box set released in 1998. According to Brucebase, the archival concept "album" was produced in-house, presumably following the conclusion of World Tour 1992-1993, perhaps to demonstrate the quality of Springsteen's unreleased archive.

Many of these 25 songs have been subsequently released, either on the Tracks box set or as part of other projects, and some others are known outtakes that are yet to circulate among fans. However, two are only known from this 25-song list: ARNIE and THAT'S OKAY.

Tracks

In the liner notes of his Tracks box set, Bruce Springsteen introduces the box set as follows:

During long intervals between my record releases, as I was spending more and more time in the studio, when I met a fan out on the street I was often asked, "What are you guys doing in there?" I regularly pondered that question myself.

What we were doing in there was making a lot of music, a lot more music than I could use at any one time. As a result, my albums became a series of choices — what to include, what to leave out? I based my decisions on my creative point of view at the moment — the subject I was trying to focus on, something musical or emotional I was trying to express. In certain instances, as on Darkness on the Edge of Town, Nebraska, and The Ghost of Tom Joad, these choices crystallized the album I was making. On some of my other records the reasons I had for choosing one song over another, in hindsight, feel a good deal less significant. One of the results of working like this was that a lot of music, including some of my favorite things, remained unreleased.

This collection contains everything from the first notes I sang in the Columbia recording studio, my early and later work with the E Street Band, through to my music in the 90s. It's the alternate route to some of the destinations I travelled to on my records, an invitation into the studio on the many nights we spent making music in search of the records we presented to you. I'm glad to finally be able to share this music; here are some of the ones that got away.

- Bruce Springsteen, September 1998

Bruce Springsteen's albums were thematically linked even if they were not strictly concept albums; so some tracks that didn't fit the theme of the album ended up orphaned, not necessarily because they didn't meet his high standards, but because, he says, they didn't fit in with the tone or themes he mined for each set. Many of these unreleased studio outtakes got under the hands of bootleggers. Discussing that issue in 1984, Springsteen told Rolling Stone's Kurt Loder, "We record a lot of material, but we just don't release it all. [...] I always tell myself that some day I'm gonna put an album out with all this stuff on it that didn't fit in. I think there's some good material there that should come out. Maybe at some point, I'll do that."

During a break in The Ghost Of Tom Joad Solo Acoustic Tour, Springsteen thought that "if it's gonna be a year or longer in between records, I have all this music that I know is very good that I never released and I should release some of it whether it was just a CD or something. In that period of time, I should put something out because people would like to have it and I'd like to see it get out." He told Toby Scott (his audio archivist and recording engineer), "send me all the archives, send everything that we recorded". Scott then went to work gathering the potential material from Springsteen's massive audio library (located, along with Sony's sound archives, in the high-tech Iron Mountain facility near Buffalo, NY). "For a week or so," he told Billboard in a Nov 1998 interview, "I just listened to everything that I'd done that we hadn't put out. I made some very brief notes in a notebook, and then I just put it away. It was something that I could do at some point when I get to that place in a new project where I'm not sure how long it's going to take and it would be nice to sort of fill the gap so the fans wouldn't be so long without hearing any music from me".

Springsteen told Mark Hagen in an interview for Mojo magazine published in January 1999, "So it began just with that idea and we listened to about 250 songs, maybe more, I made quick notes in a notebook and put it away. A year went by, more maybe, and I came off the Tom Joad tour and I began to write acoustically again and I wrote about half a record. Then I got stuck and said, 'Well, I'm going to put this aside for a while.' Then I wrote half of an electric record, and hit the same place. So I thought, instead of waiting for another year to put something out I'll put some of this music together. So once again I went back to the archives." According to interview comments made by engineer Toby Scott (Springsteen's audio archivist and recording engineer), it was in February 1998 during solo sessions being conducted at Thrill Hill Recording (Springsteen's home studio) in Colts Neck, NJ, that Springsteen told Scott that the time was right to proceed with the long-anticipated box set of archived, unreleased studio takes. Thrill Hill Recording served as the main operational center for all Tracks project activities. Note that the "Thrill Hill Recording" name is used for whatever home studio Springsteen is recording at, whether it's in Rumson, NJ, Colts, NJ, or Beverly Hills, CA.

Springsteen told Billboard that the songs were culled from between 200 and 300 tunes. According to Toby Scott, the number was down to about 128 songs by late June 1998. It was then narrowed down yet again in July to about 100 songs that were prepped for the Tracks release. Although the project was originally projected to be a 6-disc set, there was a commercial decision made later in the summer to reduce the size of the release to a 4-disc (66-track) set. The package was delivered to Sony in mid-September in order to facilitate the mid-November 1998 release schedule.

Unreleased songs from the Greetings From Asbury Park, NJ sessions were not included on the box set due to ongoing and still-unresolved court proceedings involving most of these unreleased 1972 recordings. The court battle wasn't resolved until in 2001 (April 2001 in the UK and June 2001 in the U.S.), and those recordings are now free for release at any time. The opening four tracks of the box set — which were culled from Springsteen's 03 May 1972 Columbia Records audition — were not part of the court proceedings.

On 16 Jul 1998, Springsteen attended a convention for Sony Music Entertainment Inc. in Miami, FL, where he officially announced that a box set was the works and he played a tape of three songs: WHERE THE BANDS ARE, LOOSE ENDS, and I WANNA BE WITH YOU.

The Tracks box set was released on Columbia Records on 10 Nov 1998. It was issued on both compact disc and audio cassette formats. It's a 4-disc (or 4-cassette) set consisting of a total of 66 tracks (almost 4.5 hours long), 10 of which were heretofore unavailable single B-sides, 6 were demos and alternate versions of already-released material, and 50 (48 studio and 2 live) were never-before-released songs recorded during the sessions for Springsteen's many albums. Some tracks were treated with a recent touch-up here or there to give the older recordings a fresh polish.

• Disc 1 consists of material from 1972 to 1980, including Springsteen's very first Columbia Records audition for legendary A & R executive John Hammond. This disc also features additional songs most of which recorded for (but never released on) Springsteen's first four albums.
• Disc 2 consists of material from 1979 to 1983, taken primarily from the recording sessions of The River, Nebraska, and Born In The U.S.A.. Springsteen describes this disc as "almost the completely other album from 'The River'."
• Disc 3 consists of material from 1982 to 1987, taken primarily from the recording sessions of Born In The U.S.A. and Tunnel Of Love.
• Disc 4 consists of material from 1989 to 1998, taken primarily from the recording sessions of Human Touch.

Bruce Springsteen -- Tracks

18 Tracks

18 Tracks is a Bruce Springsteen compilation album released on Columbia Records in 1999. The album compiles 15 tracks from the Tracks box set, plus 3 previously unreleased recordings. The collection release was intended for the more casual fans who didn't purchase the pricey 4-disc box set. It also served the purpose as a promotional tie-in for the E Street Band's The Reunion Tour that was announced at the same time of the sampler's release.

Bruce Springsteen -- 18 Tracks

18 Tracks was released on 13 Apr 1999 on Columbia Records. It features 18 Springsteen compositions and clocks at 71:12. The album was released on CD, cassette tape, MiniDisc, and vinyl.

The Ties That Bind: The River Collection

The Ties That Bind: The River Collection is a Bruce Springsteen box set released in 2015 on Columbia Records to celebrate the 35th anniversary of The River album. The 10"x12" box set contains four CDs, two Blu-Ray discs or three DVDs, and a hardcover 148-page coffee table book featuring 200 mostly unseen studio and live photographs, pages from Springsteen's notebooks, single covers, images and outtakes from the original album package, and other memorabilia documenting the album, plus a new essay by Mikal Gilmore. The box set was announced on 16 Oct 2015 and released to retail on 04 Dec 2015.

The Ties That Bind: The River Collection (box set cover art)

The first two discs consist of the 2014 remastered version of The River album. The third disc contains The River: Single Album, a 10-track album originally planned for release in 1979, under the title "The Ties That Bind". "The songs lacked the kind of unity and conceptual intensity I liked my music to have. So we went back in the studio," Springsteen wrote in his 1998 book Songs. He scrapped the project and went on to rework some of the songs and write and record some others, leading to the double-disc release the following year. All but one of these ten tracks were previously released.

The fourth discs contains The River: Outtakes, a 22-track album collection consisting of outtakes from the 1979-1980 sessions that didn't make the cut for either the single- or double-album versions of The River. The CD is divided into two parts, "Record One" (the first 11 tracks) and "Record Two" (the remaining 10 tracks). The former consists of unreleased songs while the latter consists of previously released songs.

The fifth disc contains the 60-minute documentary, The Ties That Bind, produced and directed by Grammy and Emmy-winning filmmaker Thom Zimny. The documentary features an intimate interview with Bruce Springsteen as he reflects on writing and recording of The River. The film transitions between Springsteen telling the stories behind the music ─ and illustrating them with solo acoustic guitar performances ─ interspersed with period concert footage and rare photos of him and the band in and out of the studio.

The sixth disc (on the Blu-Ray release) or sixth and seventh disc (on the DVD release) feature(s) The River Tour, Tempe 1980, a new professionally shot film consisting of 24 songs from Bruce Springsteen & The E Street Band's 05 Nov 1980 concert at Arizona State University in Tempe, AZ. The film uses four cameras and is recorded in multitrack audio and clocks at 2 hours and 40 minutes. The tapes were edited by Thom Zimny and the audio was mixed by Bob Clearmountain and mastered by Bob Ludwig.

The last disc also contains The River Tour Rehearsals, which consists of a 5-song 20-minute bonus footage from Bruce Springsteen & The E Street Band's private rehearsals in late September 1980 at Clair Brothers Audio in Lititz, PA. Springsteen and the band can be seen working through live arrangements of what was then unreleased material from the upcoming album.

Other Official Releases

In addition to its release on Tracks, 18 Tracks, and The Ties That Bind: The River Collection, the official studio version of LOOSE ENDS was also included on Tracks Sampler.

Bruce Springsteen -- Tracks Sampler

CD - Columbia (CSK 41561) - USA, 1998

This is a single-disc advance promotional sampler compiling 15 tracks from the Tracks box set. It was issued in the USA, Australia, and Germany, with the same track list.

Tracks Sampler track list

01- GROWIN' UP
02- RENDEZVOUS
03- HEARTS OF STONE
04- RESTLESS NIGHTS
05- WHERE THE BANDS ARE
06- LOOSE ENDS
07- I WANNA BE WITH YOU
08- BORN IN THE U.S.A.
09- LION'S DEN
10- JANEY, DON'T YOU LOSE HEART
11- SAD EYES
12- TROUBLE IN PARADISE
13- SEVEN ANGELS
14- HAPPY
15- BACK IN YOUR ARMS

Bruce Springsteen -- Tracks Sampler

CD - Columbia (CSK 41561) - Australia, 1998

Bruce Springsteen -- Tracks Sampler

CD - Columbia (CSK 41561) - Germany, 1998

Other versions of LOOSE ENDS were also officially released.

The live 27 Jun 2000 version of LOOSE ENDS was released on the Madison Square Garden, New York 06/27/2000 official live download in 2021.

The live 20 Oct 2009 version of LOOSE ENDS was released on the Wachovia Spectrum, Philadelphia, PA 10/20/09 official live download in 2017.

The live 31 Jul 2012 version of LOOSE ENDS was released on the Olympiastadion, Helsinki July 31, 2012 official live download in 2017.

The live 12 Nov 2012 version of LOOSE ENDS was released on the St. Paul, MN Nov 12, 2012 official live download in 2020.

Bootleg Releases

Prior to its release on The Ties That Bind: The River Collection, the alternate mix of this studio version of LOOSE ENDS appeared on several bootlegs, including The Ties That Bind (unknown label) [track 10] and The Definitive River Outtakes Collection Volume 1 (E. St. Records) [disc 2, track 01].

Bruce Springsteen -- The Ties That Bind (unknown label)

Bruce Springsteen -- The Definitive River Outtakes Collection Volume 1 (E. St. Records)

Live History

SECTION NOT YET COMPLETED

Covers

At least 3 artists have recorded and released Bruce Springsteen's LOOSE ENDS.

Megajam 5 -- Megajam 5

CD - Larione 10 (LAR 489076-2) - Italy, 1997
MC - Larione 10 (LAR 489076-4) - Italy, 1997

Sergio Gisbert -- Loose Ends: A Tribute To Bruce Springsteen's 78-80 Era

CD - no label (no catalog number) - Spain, 2014

This is a Bruce Springsteen tribute album.

Giusey And The Springtones -- One Night Only

Digital album - no label (no catalog number) - Germany, 2020

This is a download-only digital live Bruce Springsteen tribute album, recorded at The Stone Pony in Asbury Park, NJ.

Available Versions

List of available versions of LOOSE ENDS on this website:

Page last updated: 25 May 2017