Prove It All Night

Springsteen said the message he was trying to convey in this song is: "Success requires sacrifice." It is one of the songs on Darkness On The Edge Of Town that implies you have to work for the hopes and dreams spelled out in the songs on his previous album, Born To Run.

After Born To Run vaulted Springsteen to stardom in 1975, he was deflated by a legal battle with his first manager, Mike Appel, which kept him out of the studio for much of 1976 and 1977. When he and the E Street Band started recording again with producer Jon Landau, he had a lot of songs ready. Instead of picking the hits, Springsteen chose songs that fit the narrative of the album: You gotta pay the price. "Prove It All Night" ended up being the most radio-friendly of the 10 songs that made the cut, so it was released as the first single. It was just a modest hit, but that wasn't important to Bruce; the song integrated into an album he was proud of and that stood the test of time. As for the songs that didn't make the album, 22 of them showed up on the 2010 expanded release, including two that he gave away and were hits for other artists: "Fire" (The Pointer Sisters) and "Because The Night" (Patti Smith).

When Springsteen performed "Prove It All Night" in 1978, it was often with an instrumental guitar-and-piano intro that could go on for five minutes or more. He would sometimes tell a story about the song in this intro, which could be a different tale every night. A common one was a story he told about getting in a cab and hearing the driver complain about how he had to "prove it all night" to his boss.