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Today marks 50 years since the release of Born to Run, Bruce Springsteen’s career-saving third album, which transformed him from a regional talent with a great reputation for live performances into an international rock sensation.

Springsteen and his label, Columbia Records, celebrated the birthday by releasing a remastered, studio version of the Born to Run outtake track “Lonely Night in the Park,” which had been circulating for years on bootleg tapes and recently started airing in Sirius XM’s E Street Radio, but had never officially been released.

It’s hard to find anything that fans hadn’t already heard; hours of outtakes from the Born to Run and Darkness on the Edge of Town sessions have been floating around in collector’s circles for years, although most of those are just iterations on “Born to Run,” “Jungleland,” and “Thunder Road,” all three of which evolved significantly over the course of the record’s production.

The release of “Lonely Night in the Park” makes three outtakes officially released from Born to Run over the years, with both “Linda Let Me Be the One” and “So Young and In Love” appearing on his 1998 box set Tracks.

When Springsteen was first signed to Columbia Records in the early 1970s, he was one of their most highly-regarded new artists, and comparisons to Bob Dylan were drawn early and often both internally, and by the press covering Springsteen. Springsteen bristled at the comparisons, distancing himself from Dylan for years as a result, as detailed in the new book Tonight In Jungleland: The Making of Born to Run (and previously in the documentary Wings For Wheels, which came as part of a 30th anniversary box set of Born to Run in 2005).

After both Greetings From Asbury Park and The Wild, The Innocent, and the E Street Shuffle underperformed, and Columbia had some management turnover, most of Springsteen’s internal allies were gone. With only one record left on his contract to prove himself, Springsteen’s team resulted to subterfuge just to get Columbia to pony up the money to get that record made. Fortunately for all involved, that record was Born to Run, which went on to become one of the greatest rock albums of all time.

A little over a year before Born to Run actually made its way to record stores, Rolling Stone writer Jon Landau reviewed a Springsteen concert in The Real Paper, an alternative weekly based out of Boston. In his review, he wrote “I saw rock and roll future and its name is Bruce Springsteen.”

Landau — not to be confused with the late Jon Landau, who produced Avatar — has become Springsteen’s most consistent collaborator in the years since, taking over as the musician’s manager following Born to Run‘s release. He was credited as a producer on Born to Run, too, although on the first pressings of the record, his name is spelled wrong on the sleeve, then covered up with a small sticker that corrects it.

Landau’s review might not have galvanized Columbia right away, but leaking the “Born to Run” single to radio stations, then giving executives a chance to actually hear the full record, certainly did. By the time the album came out, to great reviews and Springsteen appearing on the cover of both Time and Newsweek at the same time, he was back in the record company’s good graces.

With only eight tracks and less than an hour of music, Born to Run nevertheless managed to supercharge Springsteen’s career, change rock history, and — in the opinion of many, myself included — become one of those rare “perfect” albums. Of course, Springsteen himself is notoriously a perfectionist, and not only drove everyone around him insane trying to achieve that perfection, but reportedly hated the record when he first heard it put to acetate, throwing the demo record into a hotel swimming pool in rage.

Since 1975, Springsteen has recorded so much music with Columbia that he was able to put together seven complete, unreleased albums recorded between 1983 and 2018 as a box set — Tracks II: The Lost Albums — earlier this year. He has said he’s at work on Tracks III — rumored to be planned for 2026 or 2027 — with yet more new material.

At the same time, Springsteen has spent much of the last three years touring with the E Street Band. Some of the members have since passed away, and there are a couple of artists who performed on Born to Run and then left the band for solo careers, but E Street has been a thread that has run through Springsteen’s career for 50 years now. Most concerts have allusions to those they have lost along the way, and Springsteen habitually tells his audiences, “If we’re here, and you’re here, they’re here.”