I have always loved this song and at the same time I've always struggled with the idea behind Bruce Springsteen's lyric. I mean, it's such a freaking sexy vibe - From the mastery of the audio production and composition itself to the fact that the song really still holds up as a piece of popular rock music. But the lyric seemed pretty dark. More about my subject matter discomfort in a moment.

Hey, if you dig you can find all my stuff at www.jackburtonmusic.com or @jackburtonmusic on socials. Wanna collab, make your own mix? Hit me up.

I've played this one live a couple times recently because its super short and sounds great on a DADGAD tuned acoustic guitar so it slides between blues tunes real well. But this week I got inspired to get into the lab and do something a little different with it. To start, who wouldn't be inspired by Max Weinberg's epic yet simple drum groove?...somehow it got me thinking, "how could I 'LCD Soundsystem' this thing up?!" So a laid down a real simple thing like the start of "This Is Happening" for a rhythmic bed. I can't stand tracking scratch guitar and vox to just a click.

After that I played with several guitar sounds and keys ideas just to get a guide going...but nothing was working. The groove was good but it's such a moody song that it would not mesh with the flippant-don't-take-this-too-seriously James Murphy thing that we all love. So I left it for a day or two. As I came back to it, I realized that the opposite of a James Murphy is a Justin Vernon - Bon Iver DOES take things too seriously and hence would be a great direction to explore. Especially for the vocals and synth moods. Now, those vocal harmonizer plugins that homeboy uses are way too expensive for your boy, so I settled for Ableton's stock vocoder and man that totally put me in a TRON meets American muscle car night drive video game music type trance. (Which also inspired the look of the video. Props to ChristianBodhi, who's royalty free pixabay video became the base footage I messed around with to make the final look). So yeah, Vocoder for the win...Though, Maja did tell me she wished she could hear my actual voice in the mix. She loves me. and really I play this song for her. Cuz She thinks its hot.

I did finally manage to sneak some acoustic guitar into the mix...kinda sloppy but I think that added some reality to this new little digital musical realm. The acoustic drums, I sampled and chopped from the stems for my song "Time For Love" recorded here in Valencia at Rio Bravo. And the percussion is a mix of me mic-ing up my amazingly tonal office desk and tapping clapping smacking around plus a couple digital noises and "chicka" I vocalized. See if you can find the chicka.

I'm not hip to all the different genres of electronic music these days, so I don't really know what style this is. I know it's not fully in that electronica, house, EDM, vein but maybe you can tell me in the comments?

So, the lyrics?? Yeah, they always had that home-wrecker kinda vibe, I thought. But while searching for inspiration, I came across the original video on YouTube and realized that Bruce actually plays it real classy at the end and doesn't take action on his "bad desire". Rather, he walks away. And I came to realize that maybe the song is in some part a treatise on Temperance and not succumbing to temptation. Maybe? But either way, The Hotness likes it when I sing it to her, so...that's good enough for me.