It’s a new year with a number of birthdays, anniversaries and notable dates to ponder. Yesterday we celebrated Elvis Presley’s birthday and today we’re noting that Bruce Springsteen’s 1978 guitar opus, Darkness on the Edge of Town, is celebrating its 40th anniversary in 2018. There will likely be more noise about the album when its official June birthday rolls around, but this disc is so essential for me that I’ll likely be posting about it here and there throughout the calendar year.

1975′s Born to Run marked the high point of the mythopoeic teenage soul that Springsteen crafted for his first three releases — early Bruce comes off like an American Van Morrison with funky horn breaks accenting his Dylanesque lyrics. But three years passed between Born to Run and Darkness on the Edge of Town while Bruce fought a legal battle with his management, and by the time he emerged in 1978 his style had transformed into lean, mean guitar music fueling stories rooted in the concerns of the working class. Darkness on the Edge of Town is the gateway to the second act of Springsteen’s career, it’s his hardest rocking record by far, and it’s a wide-eyed witness to the dark side of the American dream.

Here’s a long interview with Bruce about the making of the record from The Promise documentary…

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This year we celebrate the 40th anniversary of the 1975 release of Bruce Springsteen’s third album, the classic, Born to Run. Hearing the song “Born to Run” is one of the most important musical experiences I’ve ever had. The song and the record both manage to convey some of the most exuberant music of the 20th century while simultaneously celebrating the mythology of rock itself. I also feel like the record is great because everybody in the room was consciously aiming to create something timeless. They did it.

Here’s Wings for Wheels: The Making of Born to Run…

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Played a show on Wednesday night and premiered this re-working of the 1977 Bruce Springsteen song “Adam Raised a Cain.” I was just messing around with the chords a few months back and working on the song while rehearsing other material for the shows I’ve been doing lately. It occurred to me that the biblical allusions in the lyrics lent themselves to a more bluegrass influenced context — perfect for a guy and his guitar to play in a solo performance as the grinding electric guitar drenched original would be hard to duplicate in such a setting.

If you made it to the show, thank you! And here is another look. If you missed the performance I’m pleased to share this with you now. If you’re familiar with the original and have a thought or two about my take please leave a comment and share your ideas. This cover is being considered for the album I hope to make in the next few months and playing new material live is the best way to get a sense for which songs are really working and which are simply neat ideas that don’t seem to actually come across to an audience.

Here’s “Adam Raised a Cain” from the Sundown Sessions II at Tavern 96 in Nashville.

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Purple Rain — the record and the film — came out thirty years ago this month and Prince recently reunited with Apollonia to celebrate the date.

Prince was a musical prodigy who transformed himself from “the new Stevie Wonder” into a genre blurring phenom who had as much impact on the culture of the 1980′s as established superstars like Michael Jackson and Bruce Springsteen who were dominating the charts and the mega-tour scene.

The album Purple Reign included hits like When Doves Cry, Let’s Go Crazy and the epic title ballad. The recording introduced his band The Revolution and proved that Prince could make complex, sexual, personal music while still catching the ear of a mass audience.

Here’s a doc about the purple one’s reign during the 1980′s.

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When I hear the phrase “suicide machines” I immediately think of Bruce Springsteen’s anthemic homage to Phil Spector, “Born to Run”:

In the day we sweat it out on the streets of a runaway American dream
At night we ride through the mansions of glory in suicide machines

However, for artist Thijs Rijker, “Suicide Machines” are mechanical gizmos that are built to destroy themselves. According to the Bizzare Magazine website, “Rijker says his self-destruction pieces in a series called ‘Suicide Machines’ are “made to create empathy among humans, without human traits.”

Here are a couple of examples of Rijker’s morose mechanicals…

Suicide Machine V 2.0 from Thijs Rijkers on Vimeo.

and…

Suicide Machine Sand from Thijs Rijkers on Vimeo.

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