Update 2/10/17: Bruce Springsteen’s touching Harry Potter song that was never used has finally surfaced and it will make you want to rewatch all the movies. The song is called “I’ll Stand By You Always” and you can check out a demo version of the track below.
https://soundcloud.com/sims89-1/12-ill-stand-by-you-always-2001-demo—
As is obvious when discussing a magical world filled with wizards and talking paintings and flying brooms and all that, there are a few disconnects and lingering questions between the Harry Potter universe and our own. For instance, how do wizards and witches balance getting a real-world “muggle” education with their magical studies, or do they? Do magical people have an interest in muggle entertainment? What kind of music do they listen to?
Music doesn’t seem to play a particularly important role in the life of Potter and company—given they usually have bigger fish to fry—but it would appear that they’re blissfully unaware or just disinterested in one of the biggest names in muggle rock and roll history: Bruce Springsteen.
In a recent interview on BBC Radio 2 with Simon Mayo said he wrote a song called “I’ll Stand By You Always” that was meant for the movies, but “they didn’t use it.” He said that while it may not be a traditional Springsteen song, he was still proud of the track.
“It was pretty good,” he said. “It was a song that I wrote for my eldest son, it was a big ballad that was very uncharacteristic of something I’d sing myself. But it was something that I thought would have fit lovely; at some point I’d like to get it into a children’s movie of some sort because it was a pretty lovely song.”
Listen to that portion of the interview below, and try not to frustrate yourself imagining what Harry Potter would have been like with a bombastic Springsteen ballad.
Featured image: Warner Bros. Pictures
