Sony Music has unearthed rare material from both Patti Smith and Bruce Springsteen and has begun sharing the fruits of those labors. First up is a 50th anniversary edition of Smith’s iconic debut, Horses, while a never-before-heard Springsteen tune, “Lonely Night in the Park,” is out now ahead of the 50th anniversary of the Boss’ Born To Run.
Sony’s Legacy imprint will release an expanded Horses on Oct. 10 in both two-LP and two-CD packages. The original album has been mastered from the 1/4″ master tapes and is appended by eight previously unreleased songs, plus Smith’s 1975 RCA audition tape. The lead track, “Snowball,” can be heard below. Smith is also prepping her memoir, Bread of Angels, for Nov. 4 release from Random House.
“It’s a double album and the second was compiled after much labor,” Smith wrote on her Substack account. “Unearthed recordings, a couple live pieces from CBGB, youthful efforts gathering dust, little bits scavenged from half a century ago.” She added, “when we recorded Horses, I hoped to communicate with like minds — the misfits, disenfranchised, those scraping away off the beaten track. I am quite moved that the community I hoped to find found us as well and those that survived are still at work.”
Meanwhile, the official release of Springsteen’s long-bootlegged “Lonely Night in the Park” presages the Aug. 25 anniversary of Born To Run, for which it was “heavily considered” as part of the original 1975 track list. He and the E Street Band have never performed the song live.
Two years after the respective releases of Horses and Born To Run, Smith scored a hit single with her version of the Springsteen-penned “Because the Night,” which he recorded but ultimately left off the 1978 album Darkness on the Edge of Town.
