“Sunday Love,” a Bruce Springsteen ballad that’s premiering today that’s officially coming out as part of the Tracks II: The Lost Albums box set, finds the singer-songwriter in crooner mode.
With horns and strings, the song recalls the best of Burt Bacharach and Hal David’s melodramatic production, while the way his vocal performance flirts lightly with the swinging drums suggests he was interested in Jimmy Webb western pastiche while writing it. “Each night I pray, each night I pray to God above,” Springsteen sings, “I never had a Sunday love.” (It also sounds a little like Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds.)
The song is the opening track of Twilight Hours, the 83-track box set’s sixth disc, which Springsteen’s label says explores “orchestra-driven mid-century noir”; it reports that the singer-songwriter sees the record as “romantic, lost-in-the-city songs.” He wrote the record at the same time he wrote his Western Stars album, which came out in 2019. The box set comes out June 27.
The E Street Band’s Max Weinberg, Patti Scialfa, and Soozie Tyrell back Springsteen up on the song. Other contributors include as producer Ron Aniello and Western Stars collaborators Kaveh Rastegar and Scott Tibbs.
“At one time it was either a double record [with Western Stars] or they were part of the same record,” Springsteen said of the song. “I love Burt Bacharach and I love those kinds of songs and those kinds of songwriters. I took a swing at it because the chordal structures and everything are much more complicated, which was fun for me to pull off. All this stuff could have come right off of those Sixties albums.”
Springsteen previously released a song “Repo Man,” from the box set. That country-rock song appears on Somewhere North of Nashville, the album’s fourth disc, which he recorded at the same time as 1995’s The Ghost of Tom Joad. He also released a mariachi song, “Adelita,” from the box set as well as the tracks “Blind Spot,” “Faithless,” and “Rain in the River.”
