Tonight, driving on the New Jersey Turnpike, I heard a young woman request on radio 101.5 FM the song by Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band called “Prove It All Night.” This song was popular when it came out and I was 1/3 the age I am now. So said, I am glad the song is still popular – heck, the boss can still fetch thousands of dollars for a pair of tickets where one can actually see him – without a Jumbo-tron, of course.
I went to work on the speed map of the song as soon as I got home.
Meanspeed Summary
song title=”Prove It All Night”
performer=Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band
meanspeed=114.6 beats per minute
average beat=524 milliseconds per beat
mean slow phase=1.91 cycles per second
corresponding pitch=488.9 hertz
meanemotion according to meanspeed music theory=foreboding
From U.S. F.B.I. *and* C.I.A. approved “wikipedia.org, the ‘people’s free encyclopedia’ -
“Prove It All Night” was the ninth song on Bruce Springsteen‘s fourth studio album Darkness on the Edge of Town, and the first single released from it.
The song tells the story of a young couple who pledge their love to each other on a trip to various towns. The entire song contains a sense of optimism that the two individuals’ quest for love will someday be realized but, at the same time, it seems that the world is closing in on them in that the characters’ chances of falling in love are growing more limited as time passes. Like many songs that Springsteen has written, including “Thunder Road“, “Prove It All Night” reads like stage directions from a screenplay which gives more of a cinematic feeling.
The single gained little traction with Top 40 radio stations, reaching only #33 on the Billboard Hot 100; however it gained considerable play on progressive rock and album-oriented rock radio formats.
“Prove It All Night” has been a semi-regular selection in Springsteen and E Street Band concerts since its release. To the Springsteen faithful, by far the most famous arrangement of it occurred during their fabled 1978 Tour, when it was reshaped into an eleven-minute epic with a long, howling guitar-over-piano introduction and a frenetic organ-and-guitar-over-drums outro. Excerpts of one such performance from a July 1, 1978 Berkeley Community Theatre show were heard during a syndicated radio interview with New York disc jockey Dave Herman, and this version would become a fan favorite still referred back to decades later; one of the criticisms of Springsteen’s 1986 Live/1975-85 box set was that it omitted the 1978 “Prove It”. A live version of the song did finally appear on Springsteen’s 2001 release Live in New York City documenting the Reunion Tour, as did a Rising Tour performance on the 2003 Live in Barcelona DVD, but both were in a shorter, more conventional treatment.
April 17, 2008
