LOOSE CHANGE^©

Official studio version

Met her at a friendly little bar down along the coast
She said it was her birthday so we had us a nice little toast
Drove around for a while, smoked a few cigarettes
Took her back to my place, she slipped off her party dress
She sat for a while on the edge of the bed just talkin'
Loose change in my pocket
Loose change in my pocket

Pint of gin in my boot cuff, I'm drivin' for a drink and a dance
Sittin' on the next stool, miss a little time on her hands
Yeah I knew she was trouble, but trouble sure was lookin' fine
And when I pulled her close what I knew kinda slipped my mind
We lay in bed and watched the moon come up crawling
Loose change in my pocket
Loose change in my pocket

I pour another drink, wait for the night to get through
Stars are burning in that black void so far away and blue

Now I'm sittin' at a red light, I feel somethin' tickin' way down
The night's moving like a slow train crawling through this shithole town
Got my bags packed in the back and I'm tryin' to get going again
But red just goes to green and green goes red and then
Then all I hear's the clock on the dash tick-tocking
Loose change in my pocket
Loose change in my pocket
Loose change in my pocket
Loose change in my pocket

Page last updated: 15 Aug 2008

Intro

Music and lyrics by Bruce Springsteen, LOOSE CHANGE is a Human Touch outtake that was released on the Tracks box set in 1998.

Composition and Recording

Springsteen told Mark Hagen in an interview for Mojo Magazine published in January 1999, "I was going to go out and play with a band and needed music that was going to fill that straw, but in the meantime I wrote about half a record on the bass, where you had a note and you had your idea. I wrote about half or more of a record. The only one that made it to release was 57 Channels, but on this thing there was Over The Rise, When The Lights Go Out, Loose Change, Goin' Cali, Gave It A Name, even My Lover Man, all these very psychological portraits of people wrestling with relationships and their own isolation." All these songs were recorded in Dec 1990 or Jan 1991, and were probably written in summer-fall 1990.

Bruce Springsteen writes in his book Songs, "[The Human Touch album] took shape when Roy [Bittan] and I would play together in my garage apartment and make tapes of songs and arrangement ideas I came up with. Then we'd go into the studio and set up what essentially a two-man band. I would sing and play guitar; Roy would play keyboards and bass. Together we'd perform to a drum track. The two of us could create an entire band sound live in the studio [...] Then musicians would come in and play to what we recorded, or we'd play with them and record the songs live." On this official recording of LOOSE CHANGE, Roy Bittan is on keyboards while Springsteen handles vocals and all remaining instruments. According to the Tracks booklet liner notes, LOOSE CHANGE was recorded on 31 Jan 1991 at The Record Plant, Los Angeles, CA.

Lyrics

The editors of Backstreets Magazine write in a bonus booklet that accompanied issue #61 (Winter, 1998):

A series of encounters tied together with a one-line chorus – "loose change in my pocket" – but Springsteen has since made the song's meaning explicit: the character's connections with other people wind up meaning nothing more than a handful of pennies and nickels. If this song is a descendent of "Stolen Car," the last verse serves as a close-up of "waitin' on that little red light" and places "Loose Change" among Springsteen's most chilling tales of isolation.

Springsteen told Mojo, "With 'Stolen Car' [...] being able to have an intimate life, [that's] something that's essential to filling out your life. He was the guy that started the rest of that idea – the things that I wrote with the bass, whether it's the guy in 'Goin' Cali' or the guy in 'Loose Change' that no matter what he touches it just becomes loose change in your pocket. That's something that everybody has to learn, to find their way through."

The Tracks box set

In the liner notes of Tracks, Bruce Springsteen introduces the box set as follows:

During long intervals between my record releases, as I was spending more and more time in the studio, when I met a fan out on the street I was often asked, "What are you guys doing in there?" I regularly pondered that question myself.

What we were doing in there was making a lot of music, a lot more music than I could use at any one time. As a result, my albums became a series of choices – what to include, what to leave out? I based my decisions on my creative point of view at the moment – the subject I was trying to focus on, something musical or emotional I was trying to express. In certain instances, as on Darkness on the Edge of Town, Nebraska, and The Ghost of Tom Joad, these choices crystallized the album I was making. On some of my other records the reasons I had for choosing one song over another, in hindsight, feel a good deal less significant. One of the results of working like this was that a lot of music, including some of my favorite things, remained unreleased.

This collection contains everything from the first notes I sang in the Columbia recording studio, my early and later work with the E Street Band, through to my music in the 90s. It's the alternate route to some of the destinations I travelled to on my records, an invitation into the studio on the many nights we spent making music in search of the records we presented to you. I'm glad to finally be able to share this music; here are some of the ones that got away.

-- Bruce Springsteen, September 1998

Bruce Springsteen's albums were thematically linked even if they were not strictly concept albums; so some tracks that didn't fit the theme of the album ended up orphaned, not necessarily because they didn't meet his high standards, but because, he says, they didn't fit in with the tone or themes he mined for each set. Many of these unreleased studio outtakes got under the hands of bootleggers. Discussing that issue in 1984, Springsteen told Rolling Stone's Kurt Loder, "We record a lot of material, but we just don't release it all. [...] I always tell myself that some day I'm gonna put an album out with all this stuff on it that didn't fit in. I think there's some good material there that should come out. Maybe at some point, I'll do that."

During a break in The Ghost Of Tom Solo Acoustic Tour, Springsteen thought that "if it's gonna be a year or longer in between records, I have all this music that I know is very good that I never released and I should release some of it whether it was just a CD or something. In that period of time, I should put something out because people would like to have it and I'd like to see it get out." He told Toby Scott (his audio archivist and recording engineer), "send me all the archives, send everything that we recorded". Scott then went to work gathering the potential material from Springsteen's massive audio library (located, along with Sony's sound archives, in the high-tech Iron Mountain facility near Buffalo, NY). "For a week or so," he told Billboard in a Nov 1998 interview, "I just listened to everything that I'd done that we hadn't put out. I made some very brief notes in a notebook, and then I just put it away. It was something that I could do at some point when I get to that place in a new project where I'm not sure how long it's going to take and it would be nice to sort of fill the gap so the fans wouldn't be so long without hearing any music from me".

Springsteen told Mark Hagen in an interview for Mojo Magazine published in January 1999, "So it began just with that idea and we listened to about 250 songs, maybe more, I made quick notes in a notebook and put it away. A year went by, more maybe, and I came off the Tom Joad tour and I began to write acoustically again and I wrote about half a record. Then I got stuck and said, 'Well, I'm going to put this aside for a while.' Then I wrote half of an electric record, and hit the same place. So I thought, instead of waiting for another year to put something out I'll put some of this music together. So once again I went back to the archives." According to interview comments made by engineer Toby Scott (Springsteen's audio archivist and recording engineer), it was in February 1998 during solo sessions being conducted at Thrill Hill East (Bruce's home studio in Colt's Neck, NJ) that Springsteen told Scott that the time was right to proceed with the long-anticipated box set of archived, unreleased studio takes. Thrill Hill East served as the main operational center for all Tracks project activities.

Springsteen told Billboard that the songs were culled from between 200 and 300 tunes. According to Toby Scott, the number was down to about 128 songs by late June 1998. It was then narrowed down yet again in July to about 100 songs that were prepped for the Tracks release. Although the project was originally projected to be a 6-disc set, there was a commercial decision made later in the summer to reduce the size of the release to a 4-disc (66-track) set. The package was delivered to Sony in mid-September in order to facilitate the mid-November 1998 release schedule.

Unreleased songs from the Greetings From Asbury Park, NJ sessions were not included on the box set due to ongoing and still-unresolved court proceedings involving most of these unreleased 1972 recordings. The court battle wasn't resolved until in 2001, and those material are now free for release at any time. The opening four tracks of the box set – which were culled from Springsteen's 03 May 1972 Columbia Records audition – were not part of the court proceedings.

The Tracks box set was released on Columbia Records on 10 Nov 1998. It's a 4-disc set consisting of a total of 66 tracks (almost 4.5 hours long), 10 of which were heretofore unavailable single B-sides, 6 were demos and alternate versions of already-released material, and 50 (48 studio and 2 live) were never-before-released songs recorded during the sessions for Springsteen's many albums. Some tracks were treated with a recent touch-up here or there to give the older recordings a fresh polish.

• Disc 1 consists of material from 1972 to 1980, including Springsteen's very first Columbia Records audition for legendary A & R executive John Hammond. This disc also features additional songs most of which recorded for (but never released on) Springsteen's first four albums.
   
• Disc 2 consists of material from 1979 to 1983, taken primarily from the recording sessions of The River, Nebraska, and Born In The USA. Springsteen describes this disc as "almost the completely other album from 'The River'."
   
• Disc 3 consists of material from 1982 to 1987, taken primarily from the recording sessions of Born In The USA and Tunnel Of Love.
   
• Disc 4 consists of material from 1989 to 1998, taken primarily from the recording sessions of Human Touch.

Click here to display/hide detailed track listing with locations and dates.

Live history

Bruce Springsteen never performed LOOSE CHANGE live.