Easy listening about hard truths - Joyce Millman reviews TWILIGHT HOURS

July 11, 2025

EDITOR'S NOTE: Below is the first-to-be-published of our promised summer deep dives into each of the seven albums that comprise Bruce Springsteen's latest release, Tracks II: The Lost Albums. But as Joyce Millman herself notes below in her review of the Twilight Hours album, it's actually presented as the sixth album in the seven-albums box-set. No matter. At first we considered reviewing the Tracks II albums in the same rough chronological order in which the box-set presents them. But then we remembered that the Faithless album, consisting almost entirely of music created and recorded in 2005-2006, falls in the Tracks II presentation sequence between an album of music recorded in 1994 and one recorded in 1995. And of course the set's presentation closes with the Perfect World album, which is all over the place in terms of timeline, consisting of material ranging from the mid-1990s through 2018. Therefore, rather than worry so much about following any particular order of listening/reviewing/publishing, we thought it'd be more interesting (and maybe even a bit fun) to just let our team "mix things up" somewhat in what you, Dear Readers, get to read about first, second, third, etc. So without further ado, right now we are very pleased and honored to present Joyce Millman's insightful take on what is definitely one of Tracks II's best "lost" albums, Bruce Springsteen's Twilight Hours. Enjoy!

Of all the surprises revealed in Bruce Springsteen’s seven-album box set Tracks II: The Lost Albums, the sixth album, Twilight Hours, might be the biggest. Confronted with this record, a listener might be tempted to ask, “Why did Bruce Springsteen record an album of largely melancholy pop ballads that Frank Sinatra could have sung?” But the real question is, “What took him so long?”

It’s not hard to figure out the Boss’s appreciation for the Chairman of the Board, his New Jersey compatriot. Bruce is of the age and geographic place where Sinatra’s records were almost a natural resource, like the air or the ocean. And Springsteen had an Italian mother who was crazy for big-band and pop tunes, making it all but inevitable that Sinatra would play a part in his musical life. In the chapter “King of New Jersey (Hollywood Days)” from Springsteen’s memoir Born to Run, he recounts how he and Patti Scialfa received an unexpected invitation to an L.A. party being held in Sinatra’s honor in 1995. That led to other invitations from the man himself. In December of that year, Springsteen appeared on Sinatra’s nationally televised 80th birthday celebration, where he nervously spoke a tad too long in tribute, opening with an early childhood anecdote about hearing Sinatra’s voice on a jukebox in a bar where he and his mother Adele had gone to fetch his father home.

On the special, Bruce described Sinatra’s voice as conveying “a bad attitude, life, beauty, excitement, a nasty sense of freedom, sex, and a sad knowledge of the ways of the world…The deep blueness of Frank’s voice affected me the most.” And then Springsteen sang the Sinatra standard “Angel Eyes” in the softly raspy, intimate voice he had used on songs like “If I Should Fall Behind” from 1992’s Lucky Town, “Secret Garden” from the 1995 Greatest Hits album and much of The Ghost of Tom Joad (also 1995), accompanying himself on amplified acoustic guitar. Years later in a 2021 appearance on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, Springsteen was asked during the “Colbert Questionert” segment, “You get one song to listen to for the rest of your life. What is it?” He chose, without much deliberation, “Summer Wind” by Frank Sinatra.

The premise of the sultry “Summer Wind” – an abandoned lover lost in memories as the autumnal present blows in around him – echoes through much of Twilight Hours. But long before this album, Bruce had mastered writing bittersweet songs looking back at golden moments when all was right in the narrator’s world, before life and circumstance and time did what they always do. That sentiment is there in the soft infested summer drama of “Backstreets,” the Eden-before-the-Fall imagery of the naked lovers in “The River,” and the fog of disappointment that thickly hangs over “Racing in the Street.” He built the Broadway show, the Letter to You album, and the E Street Band’s 2023-24 world tour around a storyline of wistful remembrance, creeping mortality, and gratitude. Sinatra sang “It Was a Very Good Year.” Springsteen called it “Last Man Standing.”

Frank Sinatra, of course, didn’t write any of his songs of lonely love; they were the work of some of the greatest writers of the American Songbook era. But Sinatra’s voice – "The Voice" – was so expressive and open that he made you believe he had lived every word. As a singer, Springsteen will never approach Sinatra’s satiny perfection. But, like Ol’ Blue Eyes, he has an extraordinary ability to inhabit the emotions and characters of his songs. Still, the sophisticated “middle of the road” (Springsteen’s own description of the album’s style) songs on Twilight Hours call out for a particular style of singing to do justice to the album’s concept. As sweet as his attempt at “Angel Eyes” was on that 1995 birthday special, his voice and interpretation remained firmly within the parameters of rock and folk. The songs on Twilight Hours demand a crooner’s smoothness, enunciation, elongation; the revelation of the album is hearing Bruce achieve those qualities.

But, then, it’s not as if his pop crooner voice came out of the clear blue. It has been a work in progress for years, occasionally peeking out from behind the beefy rock and soul shouting of the "BRUCE" persona cemented into public consciousness by Born in the USA, or the dusty twang he uses on Nebraska, Tom Joad, and so many individual songs. We first heard him attempt the pop crooner voice on the moody, theatrical “Meeting Across the River” from Born to Run, stretching the ends of lines (“a meeting with a man on the other siiiiide”) out in his full-chested baritone. You can hear him going for it again on “The River.” And then, finally, he cracks the code of the pop crooner voice (or maybe he had a singing coach) with his big, smooth, easy-breezy lead vocals and multi-tracked Beach Boys-style harmonies of “Girls in Their Summer Clothes” and “Your Own Worst Enemy” from Magic (2007,) and the glorious love songs “Kingdom of Days” and “This Life” from 2009’s Working on a Dream.

Springsteen the Crooner is given free rein on the 2019 solo album Western Stars, a record that mainly drew inspiration from songwriter Jimmy Webb’s 1960’s AM-radio countrypolitan pop songs for Glen Campbell, but also from the early work of Kris Kristofferson and Harry Nilsson. There are a couple of up-tempo songs on Western Stars, “There Goes My Miracle” and “The Wayfarer,” that sound like they might even have been in Sinatra’s swinging ‘70’s wheelhouse. Bruce, Ol’ Brown Eyes, reaches peak mellow grooviness on these two tracks, making them the epitome of Easy Listening, and that’s meant as a compliment.

Most of the songs on Twilight Hours were recorded off and on from 2010 to 2018 as part of the sessions for what became Western Stars. (Full disclosure: If you read my blog review of Western Stars, you know I had issues with Springsteen making his first studio release of the Trump era such a non-political record. But the record has grown on me over time and, besides, Bruce has made his anti-authoritarian anger rousingly clear since then.)

In the hefty book accompanying Tracks II, Springsteen explains that at one point all of these songs were to be released as a double album, before he decided to separate out the country-flavored tracks of Western Stars. It was the right move to separate them. Western Stars was a Technicolor, widescreen album set in the American West, its songs depicting stereotypes of strong, silent manliness limping off into the sunset, put out to pasture by age and a changing world. By contrast, Twilight Hours is a black-and-white, midnight in the rain, big city kind of record. Its guiding spirit, thematically, is the Sinatra of Sings for Only the Lonely and In the Wee Small Hours, while also taking a cue from the complex melodies and plush string and horn arrangements of the pop hits that Burt Bacharach and Hal David wrote and produced for Dionne Warwick in the ‘60’s. Not that Twilight Hours is carefully-assembled retroism. Rather, Springsteen captures the essence of those Bacharach-David records in small, astute touches: a muted trumpet here, a bit of bossa-nova there.

Twilight Hours mostly coheres into a deliciously romantic set of songs for lovers, lonely or otherwise. The only outlier here is “I’ll Stand by You,” written for consideration in a Harry Potter movie and sung as a lullaby from parent to child. Bruce’s singing voice is more tender and obviously younger; while the song is pretty in that heart-tugging movie soundtrack way, it has no place here, like a G-rated preview shown before an R-rated movie. For an interesting exercise, try imagining which song from Western Stars would fit better in this slot. My vote goes to “There Goes My Miracle.” If you want to get even more DIY about the sequencing, Springsteen’s high lonesome falsetto on “Sunliner” from Twilight Hours would sound as at home in the world of Western Stars as a coyote’s howl.

Twilight Hours features some of Springsteen’s loveliest melodies, starting with the elegant opener “Sunday Love,” a perfect backdrop for his supple crooning. The chord structure and mantra-like repetition on the chorus (“I never had, I never had, I never had a Sunday love”) is pure Bacharach-David, while Patti Scialfa, Soozie Tyrell and Lisa Lowell’s period-appropriate upper-register backing vocals shimmer like a choir of dream girls. Patti also arranged the backing vocals for four of Twilight Hours' tracks, which is not surprising at all if you're familiar with this part from that "King of New Jersey" chapter in Springsteen's Born to Run memoir about Bruce and Patti's night at the Sinatras' home for Frank's birthday party:

"Sometime after dinner, we find ourselves around the living room piano with Steve [Lawrence] and Eydie Gormé and Bob Dylan. Steve is playing the piano and up close he and Eydie can really sing the great standards... Patti is a secret weapon. She can sing torch like a cross between Peggy Lee and Julie London (I’m not kidding.) Eydie Gormé hears Patti, stops the music and says, 'Frank, come over here. We’ve got a singer!' Frank moves to the piano and I then get to watch my wife beautifully serenade Frank Sinatra and Bob Dylan, to be met by a torrent of applause when she’s finished."

On the exquisitely orchestrated “Late in the Evening,” Springsteen’s vocal is all manly heartache, starting on a soft wobble and swooping up to the height of longing on lush lines like “I sleep ‘neath dark and empty skies/I listen to the night whisper ‘alone, alone’ …” Shoutout to Max Weinberg’s drumming here, falling suavely into rhythm beside the staccato piano riff; Springsteen is apparently not the only E Streeter with a soft spot for the middle of the road.

The most ambitious track, and the centerpiece of the album, is “Lonely Town,” a long, almost musical-theater-style number awash in romantic disillusionment. The song opens on a picture of isolation, the deep blueness of Springsteen’s vocal and the funereal orchestration introducing us to a place where “if love has let you down, there’s always a room to be found/ Here in Lonely Town.” Then the tempo abruptly turns sprightly as the narrator drifts into a memory of a once-happy family: “Bicycle bell comes ringing down the sidewalk/ I look and nothing’s there/ The crack of a bat in the late summer heat/ Leaves an echo in the air.” I don’t know if Springsteen intended the kid’s bicycle in that verse to hark back to the “bicycle spokes spinning round” in “Girls in Their Summer Clothes,” but it does. “Girls” depicted an evening walk along streets alive with bustling humanity, a setting where even Springsteen’s lovelorn character could find the possibility of happiness. But back in “Lonely Town,” those empty, rainy streets are the ghostly flipside of Blessing Street and Magic Avenue, the dream dissolving into gray.

“Lonely Town” gives way to the unabashedly operatic, Roy Orbison-conjuring “September Kisses.” The lyrics embrace the memory of past love, as Springsteen’s richly seasoned vocal, one of his finest on the record, takes flight over a heady, dramatic swirl of strings, kettle drum, piano and deep twanging guitar, with Curt Ramm’s flugelhorn wafting through the mix like cigarette smoke. On “September Kisses” and all of Twilight Hours, Springsteen sounds comfortable in both his singing and his skin. The style may be different, but the voice is still recognizably Bruce, with the warmth and honesty that has been a constant throughout all of his unexpected musical journeys. As with those previous stylistic divergences from being "BRUCE," Twilight Hours is a leap of faith, or, perhaps, a trust fall. Maybe it won’t be accepted by every fan in the spirit in which it was made. But after all this time, Bruce Springsteen has earned the right to say, “I did it my way.”