I was reading a book on the train yesterday. "Neurologists at Stanford University," the chapter said, "have demonstrated that when we listen to music it is the silent intervals in what we hear that trigger the most intense, positive brain activity. In part, this reflects the way our brains are always searching for closure. When we confront silence, the mind reaches outward." The passage came to mind when I heard the news.

With Clarence's passing, the silent intervals, the gaps, fell out all over my favorite songs. Born to Run lost half its backbone and its first break. Thunder Road lost its culmination. Rosalita lost the lightness of its jump. Drive All Night lost heartsick hours on the imagined road.  And of course there was Jungleland. The song almost disappeared. Without Clarence, there came a silence of 10 seconds… a minute…  two minutes… nearly three, a musical eternity, before the piano led to the end of the song.

The Jungleland sax solo was not a literal silence. It wasn't even a pure solo. If you knocked the instrument from the mix or just listened with half an ear, you could hear other sounds playing background texture.

But in the narrative, in the story of the song, the sax was everything, and everything was silence. The machine was sleek. The rain was soft. The kids were like shadows. Highways were operas and fights ballets.

Noise broke out in the night but then subsided, the players vanishing. Sex came in whispers. Death came with an echo. The saxophone solo explained the gauze, how we perceived a world through our wounds. Our senses surprised us, and alone, quietly, we tried to take it all in.

Without that solo, how would we get by? The question was a silly one, self-centered and overwrought. But to those of us who looked to music for answers, moments like that solo were critical. When we looked, we didn't often find answers directly. What turned up all the time, though, was sympathy, consolation at not finding what we sought. The affinity came in stories. In the accounts we received, listening closely enough, we could hear points forward. The solo was a therapy. When I heard news last night, I didn't know how to react. Where were my tools?

So, I went to bed. I posted on Facebook before I did, with an image that had come to mind that had made me happy – that somewhere a pearly gate had blown off its hinges, and there stood a big man in a white suit. The shaggy God story wrote itself. But that idea was the only one to make me happier. I was fighting off thinking about a line from A Visit From the Goon Squad. Jennifer Egan was responsible for writing the only Powerpoint slide to ever make me cry, and anybody who had read the book knew it. The line/slide was about silence in songs, with a wife raising her voice into a shout. "The pause makes you think the song will end. And then the song isn't really over, so you're relieved. But then the song does actually end, because every song ends, obviously, and THAT. TIME. THE. END. IS. FOR. REAL."

Clarence, we knew, hoped the hardest against the real end.

He had taken Springsteen's break-up of the E Street Band roughest, having committed the band to his identity. At the brief 1995 reunion, captured in the Blood Brothers documentary, the lingering separation and hurt were obvious. When the band finally did resume four years later, no one enjoyed the opportunity more visibly. As much as could be written at his death about influences and stylings, Clarence most crucially held the longest note, not just in the band but for the band.

Without him, I doubted a reunion would've happened, taking with it the full E Street Band time I was able to witness. My very first show, the seats were just off Clarence's side of the stage. The first time he turned our way, it was surprising how nuts we went. Here came the Big Man and the sparks. Couple years later, I got an autograph from him and even an interview. (I couldn't have been more nervous. He couldn't have been more laid-back.) In concert, my favorite moment may have been hearing the Jungleland solo at Fedex Field, from sad folding-chair seats at the field's wrong end, 90 yards from the stage. The sax floated so easily up and over the crowd to where we stood.

Everyone who went to a show had the same experience. There was always a point in the night when the claim Clarence was the biggest man in the universe somehow came true. Clips to this effect filled my streams last night. Badlands. Ties That Bind. Spirit in the Night. The list went on and on. Secret Garden in rare plays. Radio Nowhere recently.

The mourning continues today in the feeds but so do the videos.

All of the gaps that exist in the songs now, the silences that mean a for-real end, the mind reaches outward, like the scientists say. How joyous it is to find so much sound there, waiting for us to remember.

Dropkick Murphys + a surprise Springsteen + Boston on one fired-up St. Patrick's week Friday night. (Sound gets better as it goes along.)

Via Backstreets, YouTube and one kick-ass pit taper.

1. The rock-and-roll Finn McCool now playing at the Woolly Mammoth. Friend Lisa and I saw the musical in appropriate form, starting with the Cava sangria at Jaleo and then crossing the metaphorical Iberian land bridge to the theater beer stand. The show was a hit at D.C.'s Fringe festival last summer, and it won over our small audience (in the small Woolly rehearsal space) as well. Reviews said to ignore the plot, and they were right on. I'd read a book on Irish folk hero McCool as a kid. The plot confused me even then. Long story short, he saved Ireland, and that act — and electric guitars — made the performance a winner.

2. My shamrock plant. After years of disasters (yes, three links there) with my earlier shamrocks, the one from last year is still going strong.

3. Dropkick Murphys feat. Mr. Bruce Springsteen, Peg O' My Heart. Damn the lawyers for knocking this song off YouTube. You're going to have to settle for the iTunes preview page and understand that the rest of the song is as excellent as the sample you hear. I'm biased toward Bruce, but unless you live in some alternative universe that a lovely drinking song that also works as a drink-y love song, you're going to agree.

4. This vanity plate, via Melissa.

5. Beeramisu. This Serious Eats article Jess forwarded combines two of my favorite things. In the words of one commenter, "I mostly just want to keep saying 'Beeramisu!' over and over again. That has got to be one of the best made-up words ever." Happy St. Patrick's Day, all.

I believe there's a certain kind of luck in the world for fans. When you are a big enough fan of something, you visit an abandoned work office, wait for a meeting to begin, pick through a box of technology junk left by a previous inhabitant, and find a CD labeled "BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN."

I love the kill-your-idols musical exercise. Trash legends, destroy past praise and unquestioned adulation and return balance to the scales of critical history. But I don't go as far as our time's greatest practitioner of the exercise. Former Sun-Times critic and famous Springsteen hater Jim DeRogatis literally writes the book on it. I don't have the desire to kill anything, musical acts or otherwise. A thorough deconstruction and devaluation are enough for me. I believe balance in my own opinion is adequate, and the world has plenty of shouters to work the extremes.

Nick Hornby taking on the challenge is intriguing. His sentimentality has been open across much of his writing, often a major artery and subject for complaint upon pure rock writers. But kill-your-idols is exactly what Hornby's latest book, Juliet, Naked, turns out to be. He invents a mess of a once-dramatic, now love-broke, pop-rock singer-songwriter whose life and music appear deep with secret stories but remain emotionally accessible, perfect for aging fan boys to "analyze"-slash-moon-over.

If you've ever read his High Fidelity, 21 Songs, About a Boy, A Long Way Down, Fever Pitch, or generally anything Hornby has written, or seen the movie adaptation of his books, or heard him talk about music live (with Marah or elsewhere), you know he is admittedly — proudly — an aging fan boy. If he didn't admit such, he would on one level feel he was denying his humanity and on another level call himself a wanker.

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I can't tell you how much I've been enjoying the new Springsteen set, unpacking outtakes and footage of the Darkness on the Edge of Town sessions and tour. The set's assembly is unorthodox, so let's do a post just on that, okay? Okay! Top 10 things about the Promise box set:

1. The notebook covers. I've never seen notebook covers on a box set before, and neither have you. The front has notebook wear, white where the blue's worn, and a mug stain. The back is cracked and a bit doodled. All the pages are college ruled with perforations and folders.

2. Discarded ideas. One page has a note about ending Racing in the Street with an apparent shout of "Here they come" and a cop siren.

3. Word pairings. Scrawled together with no explanation.

god / ramrod
drive on / don't stop
it's my shame / Alaska pipeline

4. Ha. On a "Work Sheet" page, we find, "1. Rent 'Badlands' movie."

5. Voting? There's a page with hash marks next to a few dozen songs. The Promise ties Badlands for the most marks, and they beat Racing in the Street by one. Meanwhile, Something in the Night, Darkness and Candy's Boy get one mark each. There's no explanation for the marks.

6. Discarded titles. They get a whole page. Riders in the Rain, Fallen Angels, American Streamer, Ramrod, Driving Force, Street Racing through America, Bad Lands, RamCharger, The Hard Land, Streets of Fire, Night Shift, Independence Day, Desiree [Desire?], Night Patrol, Street Racing in America, With Death in their Eyes, The Outsiders, Promised Land, Hot Rod Angels in a Promised Land, Hot Rod Angels. Thank God all of them lost.

7. Cover songs for the tour. A list: Elvis' Little Sister and His Latest Flame. When a Man Loves a Woman. Brown-Eyed Handsome Man.

8. The review. The notebook grabs a copy of the Houston Chronicle's review. "It might have been cold outside, but it was hot at the Summit Friday night — searingly so. Fierce and fiery. Cookin' and burnin'. And, well, there just ought to be a law against early newspaper deadlines. At least when Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band is in town."

9. Discarded lyrics. Like on Badlands.

It's lights out tonight streets are filled with [lower?] power
In a city in the dark the world suddenly has new owners
I'm pushin outa park and I'm comin lookin for you tonight

10. Editing. Discarded ideas, titles and verses are all a good thing in this notebook. What remains is an album about, in life, what remains.

Lights out tonight
trouble in the heartland
Got a head-on collision
smashin' in my guts, man
I'm caught in a cross fire
that I don't understand
But there's one thing I know for sure girl
I don't give a damn
For the same old played out scenes
I don't give a damn
For just the in betweens
Honey, I want the heart, I want the soul
I want control right now
talk about a dream
Try to make it real
you wake up in the night
With a fear so real
Spend your life waiting
for a moment that just don't come
Well, don't waste your time waiting

*Not having seen the box yet. Working from promo materials only…

1. Because the Night from the full '78 Houston show. Houston hasn't existed in great form among collectors, so the full show is what I'm looking forward to most. The picture quality is about at my expectation levels, but the audio quality is far above them and is a great surprise. The performance itself fits with the known bootlegs from that late tour period. There's no hard-driving back-and-forth to end the song — as happened elsewhere — but believe me, this is much more than okay.

2. The Promise, in the studio in '78. There's been some disappointment among the hardcores, myself included, that the Promise on the double-disc audio release in the box is dressed up a bit. Not a ton, but enough where it doesn't feel completely true to the song's studio or live takes in the era. Here, we get that truth. Mumbled, broke, sparse, churning through depression and its roots in loss. With song that disappeared for decades, the video is the best surprise in what we've seen so far.

3. Save My Love, live 2010.  When this song surfaced first from the box previews, I wasn't thrilled. Starting promotion of a '78 box set with a 2010 vocal? You could hear Bruce straining to approximate '78 vocals. But debuting the song live on stage this month with Joe Grushecky and the Houserockers, I like it 10x. Listening to this song before work, it got stuck in my head on the subway. Major credit to the Houserockers, considering A) this was the debut B) of someone else's relic song.

4. The box set unboxing video. As I tweeted the other day, I've never truly understood the appeal of unboxing videos until seeing the meme applied to Springsteen. The notebooks! Promo materials mentioned there would be some representation of Bruce's notebooks from the time, but I didn't expect pages and pages of reproductions. Wins for narrative creation and history here. You can bet I'll study every page.

5. The fact that we've barely seen anything yet.

My friends down the work hallway at NPR Music published tonight their First Listen of the new Springsteen release, The Promise, with outtakes from the Darkness on the Edge of Town sessions. Controversially among Bruce devotees, certain songs get more than a cleaning. New vocals and new instrumentation enter the mixes. From Bruce's comments, he sees the release as a statement now on what he was doing then.

Only listening to the full release can tell us how well he pursues that goal, and the First Listen only has 15 songs. So, not wanting to dig in too deeply yet, here are five takes on just the First Listen material…

1. The #1 highlight for me here is Ain't Good Enough for You. The good-humored, got-dumped party song was previously available on bootlegs under the name What's the Matter Little Darling, muffled, tinny blah and running a little fast. This cut sounds true to the time, gets a perfect mix and adds an instant-classic line, "I got a job in sales / I bought a shirt uptown in Bloomingdales." One concern I have about the remastering is ruining the desolate sound in the Darkness theme. For a party song, that kind of tune-up hits the spot, Asbury Juke-style. In this era, Bruce would sometimes talk in concert about the Swingin' Medallions (Double Shot of My Baby's Love, etc) and launch into an early version of Sherry Darling. The E Street Band had a great rave-up album in them then.

2. Of the released material, Fire does great in the studio. The slightly quicker beat is a different creation than the sensual live version, and I can't turn it off. Because the Night, though, fails big time. Singing the Patti Smith verses instead of his original wording may benefit the next doctoral student to write on Springsteen and Gender Roles, but you can tell he doesn't buy them as much as he does his own. Hear the version from the Darkness tour (below). Anything else pales. And the "rock" take on Racing in the Street? Hard to hear except in a wormhole, alternate universe sense. Weaker lyrics, over-orchestrated (similar to the rejected Jungleland mixes from the Born to Run sessions), indecent and possibly illegal use of strings, the biggest remix #fail of this lot.

3. Outside Looking In has been a boot favorite of mine for years, and the treatment here is two+ minutes of Jersey-shore-surf-rock heaven. Gotta Get That Feeling isn't as interesting — almost Darkness traveling music, needing a voice as soulful at Southside Johnny's to truly make it work. (Same for the until-now unheard It's a Shame.) But it makes the hop from bootleg to release decently too. … Candy's Boy… also known from boots but never beloved. Imagine a mash-up of every song from the Darkness era. In one song, we get: the roots of Candy's Room, the Dynamo from Prove It All Night, a sped-up beat from Factory, lyrics from the soon-to-be-recorded Drive All Night, same for Frankie, and others.

4. Wrong Side of the Street and Save My Love both get strong, late Mick Jagger, old-song, new-singing treatment, with Wrong Side probably a half-and-half deal. Neither offers much to me at first listen. The choices here make me curious about the selection process. The Promise is no Witmark Demos. Everything sounds clean. Makes me wonder what the choices would have been if sound quality hadn't been so important. The Brokenhearted raises this question too. This version is significantly wordier than what we knew from the Darkness tour rehearsal boots, and modern Bruce sings the last verse. What issues were in the vault copy that made rework necessary? (Can we Web-release the tapes?)

5. Back to the desolation. The Promise and City of the Night are great songs. (The latter is known on bootlegs with titles that are only a tad different but much better, City at Night and Taxi Cab.) Both come mostly in old-voice mode, which is fantastic. The end of City is dubbed, after being unintelligible on the bootlegs forever, but Bruce pulls it off very well. My issue with both is the sound. Perfect, yes, but also filled out. Strings sneak into the back of the Promise mix, and there's vocal echo in the chorus. One of the saddest works in the Springsteen canon, the song temporarily loses that title when this new version is playing. City, meanwhile, has made every list of top 5 or 10 unreleased Springsteen songs I've put together in the last decade. As I've written in this blog before, the song captures the empty street. (It's also great for singing in the shower.) The new mix loses that image some. The old version:

I'm excited to hear the rest of this release and how Darkness proper fairs in remastering. In the First Listen, results are mixed, but they're better than I expected, honestly. I'm hopeful about what's left. The Darkness has to beat strings, right? That's what I keep telling myself.

1. Because I'm not Jewish, and though my dating history holds to no religious lines, I don't want to be part of a Nerve trend story. (I think there was a Journal story too, a couple years ago, but I can't find it. And if I were part of a Nerve trend story, there are likely much more fun Nerve trend stories to be a part of. You put what where? Okay!)

2. I don't date online. I get enough Web at work. And at home. Also, I've managed a social net. I've seen too many profiles to want to pen one. Also, the reason you blog for years is the opposite of profiling. A profile is a stable description. A blog contains new multitudes daily.

3. As much as I've enjoyed 50 First (J)Dates since the Post introduced me to it this summer, this statement is so wrong. "Dear prospective men, please never say any of the following on your profile: … 2. Your love of Billy Joel or Bruce Springsteen. Like, duh." Well. Ms. Meredith Fineman, I'll save the full monologue. I like your blog and think you're pretty (even if, should we ever meet and fall for each other, kissing you might evoke odd memories of your dad on Washington Week in Review — sincerely, my formative D.C. childhood), but you couldn't be more wrong on this. Joel and Springsteen are not interchangeable.

I post Springsteen love in my Facebook to show I don't have love for Billy Joel. The Piano Man is good, great early stuff, but come on now.

Profiles with love of Billy Joel… well, I don't know what they're saying. They didn't start the fire? Bottle of red, bottle of white, I support that. But Mustang or 'vette, Mary Ann or Ginger, Fenty or Gray, we choose. The respective voices of New Jersey and Long Island, the same deal.

Carry on.