The death of Don Kirshner on 17 January at age 76 is a reminder that although the age of the New York-based song factory seems to be long gone, pop is still about the backroom. Where would Lady Gaga be without a producer/songwriter like Red One? What Kirshner established with his music publishing company Aldon went way beyond getting songs to the performers. He set a template that still resonates through pop.

Broadcast News gets reinvented for our ever more frivolous television age, alongside healthy enough dollops of Working Girl, The Devil Wears Prada and Confessions of a Shopaholic (among others) to make Roger Michell's latest Hollywood entry seem like one long, extended pitch. That this comes from the same man who in the past year or so has directed - superlatively - Rope and Tribes on the London stage itself testifies to the divisions between the commercial and the personal, between catering to the marketplace and feeding one's soul, that this movie, in fact, is about. The film itself may not seem plausible for a single minute, but the tensions it describes could not ring more true.

Broadcast News gets reinvented for our ever more frivolous television age, alongside healthy enough dollops of Working Girl, The Devil Wears Prada and Confessions of a Shopaholic (among others) to make Roger Michell's latest Hollywood entry seem like one long, extended pitch. That this comes from the same man who in the past year or so has directed - superlatively - Rope and Tribes on the London stage itself testifies to the divisions between the commercial and the personal, between catering to the marketplace and feeding one's soul, that this movie, in fact, is about. The film itself may not seem plausible for a single minute, but the tensions it describes could not ring more true.

McCartney and Wonder. Jagger and Bowie. Mullard and Baker. Music history teaches us that the star collaboration doesn't always transmute into artistic gold. The Chairman of the Board himself, with a little help from Vandross, Streisand, Bono et al, had a spectacular misfire with Duets Vol 1. Mercilessly butchering many of Francis Albert's best-known songs, the results, artistically speaking, aren't so much a case of, “Yeah, I once recorded with Sinatra, you know,” as, “Number of copies: entire stock.

Ever since Catfish appeared in the States earlier in the year, debate has been raging about its bona fides. On the face of it an ingenious documentary playing smartly with the potential and pitfalls of social networking and the nature of personal identity in the cyber age, the film has triggered cries of “foul” from a number of critics and viewers. Morgan Spurlock, who made the junk-food odyssey Super Size Me, has called Catfish “the best fake documentary I’ve ever seen”.

Miss Frankie Rose is the veteran of scads of über-trendy bands. In desperately hip, always stewing Brooklyn, she's a one-woman music scene. Inspired by the mid/late-Eighties UK indie sound, The Cramps, Phil Spector and Sixties girl groups, she's landed in north London with her new band Frankie Rose and the Outs. Their debut album is a wonderful fuzz-pop confection, but could it work live?

It’s 6.20 on a chilly Monday evening. The doors at the venerable Bitter End club in Greenwich Village don’t open till seven but already the line for the open-mic Moth StorySLAM is snaking down the block, way past the corner of Bleeker Street into La Guardia Place. It’s a chatty, hyper crowd, mainly in their twenties and thirties, some nervously eager to take the stage for five minutes and tell their stories, some, like me, there just to listen. We know there may be agents in the audience, scouting for talent. Tonight the topic is Disaster, very suitable for post-Thanksgiving.

Anyone who has ever spent even a little time in a recording studio will be aware that the process of making an album lies somewhere between “watching paint dry” and “ripping out your own toenails” on the scale of interesting and enjoyable activities. It rarely makes for great television. The first image we saw in last night’s Imagine was of a youthful Bruce Springsteen holed up in New York’s Record Plant studio in 1977. He yawned; then he yawned again. Here we go, I thought.

What elevated the film to more than just muso musing about “sound pictures”, “dead rooms” and “snare sounds”, all of which reaffirmed the truism that making records is generally about as much fun as dental extraction, were the uniquely dramatic circumstances it documented. This programme was an edited version of the Thom Zimny documentary The Promise: The Making of Darkness on the Edge of Town, which accompanies the boxed version of The Promise, the recently released double album comprising 21 songs recorded in 1977 and 1978 by Springsteen during the making of his fourth album, Darkness on the Edge of Town.

Recalled through a mixture of archive footage and new interviews with all those involved, these epic sessions held a significance beyond their immediate context. They soundtracked an artist in a state of personal, professional and creative flux. Specifically, the Darkness... sessions took place beneath two hovering storm clouds – one was fame, the other was a lawsuit. It was obvious that Springsteen found the former by far the more troublesome.

Having roared to stardom in 1975 with Born to Run, he was battling what he called in the film “the separation of success”. On his guard against accusations of frivolity and hype, Springsteen resolved that his next album would be “a reaction to my own good fortune, reflecting a sense of accountability to the people I grew up with”. His first three records had been wild, boisterous, theatrical affairs filled with carnival music, urban gypsies and romanticised street characters. With Darkness... he wanted to drain all that colour away, leaving only what he described as “an austere, apocalyptic grandeur”. Or as his manager and producer Jon Landau put it: “We wanted the coffee black.” 

His new songs were a reckoning with the adult world of work, compromise and disappointment. Interviewed in 2010 for the film, Springsteen said he asked himself: how do we honour our own lives? What can and cannot be compromised without losing yourself? These questions were especially pertinent given the fact that at the time he was embroiled in legal action with his manager, Mike Appel, which boiled down to the question of who had creative control over Springsteen's career.

While the lawsuit was ongoing, he was prevented from going into the studio with any producer not approved by Appel. So at first he simply didn’t go in at all. We saw some fantastic footage shot in 1977 at his New Jersey farm, when he was effectively under the recording equivalent of house arrest. Stripped to the waist, sporting a hairstyle apparently modelled on Bob Dylan’s dog, he looked like some creative outlaw on the lam. Interestingly, he seemed to positively embrace the lawsuit. It made him an outsider again at a time of bewildering success, and steeled his resolve to follow his vision without compromise.

In June 1977 the suit was settled in Springsteen’s favour and he entered Record Plant in New York to begin recording. We saw that process evolve through old black-and-white film (pictured above) depicting long hours, days and weeks of frustration, mechanical drudgery and confusion, punctuated by some brief, electrifying moments of pure musical connection - none more so than the joyous run through of “Sherry Darling”, with Springsteen bashing out the chords on the piano and his guitarist Steve Van Zandt hammering out a rhythm with a pair of drum sticks on what looked like a rolled up carpet.

• Bruce Springsteen: In His Own Words reviewed on theartsdesk

Overleaf: watch "Sherry Darling" performed on The Promise: The Making of Darkness On the Edge of Town