This week, Bruce Springsteen released his soul covers album Only The Strong Survive, featuring renditions of Frank Wilson’s “Do I Love You (Indeed I Do),” the Commodores’ “Nightshift,” and “Don’t Play That Song (You Lied),” which was originally written by Ahmet Ertegun and Betty Nelson. This week, he revealed that he’d actually scrapped an “entire record” prior to arriving at the final cut. Speaking to Edith Bowman, Springsteen said that the initial choices “didn’t feel quite right.”

Here’s the entire quote, via Exclaim:

Initially, it was really hard. I was picking material and I’m going, “It’s hard to sing somebody else’s songs, and get them to sound authentic and it’s coming out of you.” So I made an entire record that I threw out, and it’ll show up in different places, and there were some good things on it but didn’t feel quite right.

So I came across this ‘Do I Love You’, the Frank Wilson, Motown rarity, and the States, I guess, no one had heard it. And I want to try that. And so my producer, Ron Aniello, created the track and the track was really good, really strong. I said, “Well, if I can get up near Frank Wilson’s range, I’m going to take a swing at it.” And we cut that, that felt great.”

I said well, maybe I’ll orient myself towards soul music, because it’s how I grew up, and all my great mentors were soul men that came, Sam Moore and, of course, James Brown, Smokey Robinson as a writer. I mean, just so many. And the great singers, David Ruffin, Levi Stubbs, all masters. They were all my masters and I said well, let me try and sing some of this material.

Only The Strong Survive is out now via Columbia Records.