Album version
Well the multitude assembled and tried to make the noise
Them black blind poet generals and restless loud white boys
But time's grew thin and the axis grew somehow incomplete
Where instead of child lions we had aging junkie sheep
Well how many wasted have I seen signed "Hollywood or bust"
And left to ride the ever ghostly Arizona gusts
Cheerleader tramps and kids with big amps sounding in the void
High society vamps, ex-heavyweight champs mistaking soot for soil
So break me now big Mama as Old Faithful breaks the day
Believe me my good Linda, the aurora will shine the way
The confederacy's in my name now, the hounds are held at bay
The axis needs a stronger arm, do you feel your muscles play
Well the doorstep blanket weaver, Madonna pushes bells
From house to house I see her giving last kisses and wishing well
To every gypsy mystic hero that the kids might find a place
Who get lost forever mothers and fathers on their weekends out in space
Well sons they search for fathers, but the fathers are all gone
The lost souls search for saviors, but saviors don't last long
Those nameless questless renegade brats who live their lives in song
They run the length of a candle with a goodnight whisper then they're gone
So break me now big Mama as Old Faithful breaks the day
Believe me my good Linda, the aurora will shine the way
The confederacy's in my name now, the hounds are held at bay
The axis needs a stronger arm, do you feel your muscles play
Yeah!
Well the missions are filled with hermits, they're looking for a friend
The terraces are filled with cat-men just looking for a way in
Those orphans jumped on silver mountains lost in celestial alleyways
They wait for that old tramp Dog Man Moses, he takes in all the strays
Now don't you grow on empty legends or lonely cradle songs
Billy the Kid was just a bowery boy who made a living twirling his guns
The night she's long and lanky and she speaks in a mother tongue
She lullabies the refugees with amplifier's hum
So break me now big Mama as Old Faithful breaks the day
Believe me my good Linda, the aurora will shine the way
The confederacy's in my name now, the hounds are held at bay
The axis needs a stronger arm, do you feel your muscles play
The confederacy's in my name now, the hounds are held at bay
The axis needs a stronger arm, do you feel your muscles play
SONG FOR ORPHANS 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 SONG FOR ORPHANS as released in 2020.
SONG FOR ORPHANS was written sometime in 1971. Prior to its official release in 2020, one studio version of the song was in circulation among collectors. It's a studio take likely recorded around May-Jun 1972 at Pocketful Of Tunes Studios in New York City, NY. It features Springsteen solo on vocals and acoustic guitar. The May-Jun 1972 sessions at Pocketful Of Tunes Studios were produced by Mike Appel and Jim Cretecos, and Cretecos took the role of recording engineer. See the unofficial studio version for more details and for more information about the so-called "London Publishing Demos".
According to Sony's logs of Bruce Springsteen's studio sessions, SONG FOR ORPHANS was also cut on 19-20 Feb 1973 at 914 Sound Studios in Blauvelt, NY. These sessions came after Greetings From Asbury Park, N.J. was released, so they're more appropriately classified as The Wild, The Innocent, & The E Street Shuffle recording sessions.
The album version of SONG FOR ORPHANS, which was released on Letter To You in 2020 and from which the above lyrics are transcribed, was recorded with The E Street Band live in studio in November 2019 (see the "Letter To You" section below for more details).
SONG FOR ORPHANS (written as "Song To Orphans") appears on a Springsteen handwritten song list that was put up for auction in December 2013 on GottaHaveRockAndRoll.com. This is most probably a list of songs that Springsteen was considering taking into the studio at the very early stages of the Greetings From Asbury Park, N.J. recording sessions (July 1972).
SONG FOR ORPHANS was a candidate track for Born To Run, as evidenced in handwritten lists of candidate tracks for Springsteen's third studio album.
SONG FOR ORPHANS appears on an untitled list containing 10 tracks and dating from 1974. The list was written on a lined notebook page using blue ballpoint pen (see below scan). Springsteen wrote "Song For Orphans" on this list.
SONG FOR ORPHANS appears on an untitled list containing 7 tracks and dating from 1974. The list was written on a lined notebook page using blue ballpoint pen (see below scan). To save space, it seems that Springsteen just wrote the list on the same page that he previously used for a 3-line "to do" list. Springsteen just wrote "Orphans" on this list, with "(?)" next to it.
Two lists titled "New Album #3 (Songs)", one containing 10 tracks and one containing 13, were on display at the From Asbury Park To The Promised Land 2009-2010 exhibition at the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame And Museum in Cleveland, OH. They date from 1974 and were written on the same notebook page, but it's unknown whether the two were composed at the same time or if Springsteen returned to the same page some time later to add the second. The below scan is taken from issue #89 (Summer 2010) of Backstreets magazine in which a typed version of the lists is reproduced. Springsteen wrote "Wild Billy's Song to Orphans" on the first of these two lists and "A Song For Orphans" on the second. It seems strange that he wrote two different titles for the same song on the same page. It's possible that the second list was written at a later time and Springsteen had reworked the song by that time. It's also possible that "Wild Billy's Song to Orphans" and "A Song For Orphans" are different. If that's the case, then the former may be related to WILD BILLY'S LULLABY.
Additionally, in a handwritten list from the same period titled "Album #3 Titles", Springsteen wrote "Poems for Orphans". So there's a possibility that SONG FOR ORPHANS has also been considered as the title track for Springsteen's third album.
Bruce Springsteen copyrighted the song in 1983 under the title "Song to orphans" (registration no. PAu000513150) and in 1999 by under the titles "Song to the orphans" (registration no. PAu002367579), "Song to orphans" (registration no. SRu000334321), and "Song for orphans" (registration no. SRu000334321).
Over the years, the song was also known under the titles "Song To Orphans", "Song To The Orphans", and "Song Of The Orphans". Springsteen wrote "Song To Orphans" on a 1972 list of songs and "Song For Orphans" on a 1974 list of songs (see the two lists above). He wrote "Song To Orphans" on the setlist for the 21 Nov 2005 show and "Song .. Orphans" on the setlist for the 21 Nov 2005 show. However, he introduced the song on both shows as "Song For Orphans".
In 2019, when the live 22 Nov 2005 version of the song was officially released, the title "Song For Orphans" was used. And, ending all doubt, the song was released under the title "Song For Orphans" on the 2020 album 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.
| Country | Chart | Peak position |
| Australia | Aria Top 50 Albums | 1 |
| Austria | Ö3 Austria Top 40 Longplay | 1 |
| Belgium (Flanders) | Ultratop 200 Albums | 1 |
| Belgium (Wallonia) | Ultratop 200 Albums | 3 |
| Canada | Billboard Canadian Albums | 2 |
| Czech Republic | ČNS IFPI - CZ Albums Top 100 | 6 |
| Denmark | Hitlisten Album Top-40 | 1 |
| Finland | Suomen Virallinen Albumilista | 2 |
| France | Top Albums (SNEP) | 4 |
| Germany | Offizielle Deutsche Charts - Top 100 Album | 2 |
| Greece | IFPI Top-75 Albums | 4 |
| Hungary | MAHASZ Album Top 40 Slágerlista | 11 |
| Ireland | Official Irish Albums Chart Top 50 | 1 |
| Italy | FIMI Top Album | 1 |
| Japan | Oricon Albums Chart | 23 |
| New Zealand | Official Top 40 Albums | 1 |
| Norway | VG-lista Topp 40 Album | 1 |
| Poland | ZPAV Oficjalna Lista Sprzedaży | 6 |
| Portugal | AFP Top 50 Albums | 1 |
| Scotland | OCC Official Scottish Albums Chart Top 100 | 1 |
| Spain | Promusicae Top 100 Albumes | 2 |
| Sweden | Sverigetopplistan - Albums Top 60 | 1 |
| Switzerland | Schweizer Hitparade - Alben Top 100 | 1 |
| The Netherlands | Dutch Album Top 100 | 1 |
| UK | OCC Official Albums Chart Top 100 | 1 |
| USA | Billboard 200 | 2 |
Other versions of SONG FOR ORPHANS were also officially released.
SONG FOR ORPHANS is known to have been performed at least twice during what is considered the Greetings From Asbury Park, N.J. Tour (October 1972 to September 1973). Many of that period's setlists are incomplete or unknown, and therefore, the song must have been played on some more dates during the Greetings From Asbury Park, N.J. Tour. It is also known that Springsteen performed it during his short-lived solo period in summer 1972 and occasionally included it in his opening solo acoustic segment during the first three months of the tour.
SONG FOR ORPHANS was performed twice during the Devils & Dust Solo Acoustic Tour (72 dates, April to November 2005), on the very last two dates. The song featured Alan Fitzgerald on piano. The live 22 Nov 2005 version of SONG FOR ORPHANS was released on the Sovereign Bank Arena, Trenton, NJ 2005 official live download in 2019.
In 1973, Bruce Springsteen performed SONG FOR ORPHANS on one radio performance. See the live 09 Jan 1973 version for more details.
As far as it's known, no artist has recorded and released Bruce Springsteen's SONG FOR ORPHANS.
Some of the above info about the studio recording and the live performances is taken from Brucebase.
If you have scans or photos of the lists that were on display at the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame And Museum in Cleveland, OH, or any other Springsteen sheet that mentions this title, or if you have any corrections or additional info, please contact me via the below form or by email: .
List of available versions of SONG FOR ORPHANS on this website:
SONG FOR ORPHANS [Album version]
