There comes a time when devotees of Bruce Springsteen start obsessing over the music he didn’t release. Once you’ve made it through the studio albums and B-sides, the live records and bootlegs, you’ll hear rumors of all the music left in a vault somewhere in the swamps of Jersey—casualties of a dogged perfectionism that led the endlessly prolific songwriter to consider scrapping even Born to Run and leaving “No Surrender” off Born in the U.S.A.
At this point in your fandom, you may decide that disc two of Tracks—1998’s four-disc, career-spanning outtakes collection that still managed to disappoint some fans for not being comprehensive enough—is the best record he ever made. You may go to a concert holding up a sign to hear “Zero and Blind Terry.” You may insist there’s a scrapped album from the ’90s inspired by West Coast hip-hop—and that it might finally be coming out soon. Friends and family might start to worry about you.
While I understand this all could sound fanatical, no one has perpetuated the mythology more than Springsteen himself. With this review of Tracks II: The Lost Albums, I’ve now covered 11 official releases for this website, and by the time that pretty much all of them were published, he was already in the press talking about the next thing he was working on. (The streak continues: Tracks III is finished. As is a new solo album.) Even given this history, Tracks II holds a special place for Springsteen fans. Where Tracks compiled individual songs that were cut from his famously exacting studio albums, the long-awaited sequel presents entire projects that he wrote, recorded, and, for one reason or another, decided not to release. Some songs have been passed around in rough form for decades; most are unknown to even the most serious collectors.
Before we get to the music—seven previously unreleased albums recorded between 1983 and 2019, 83 songs, the majority of them excellent—it’s important to situate Springsteen as a legacy artist in 2025. Where Bob Dylan continues his Bootleg Series in the form of expertly crafted museum exhibitions, and Neil Young opens his Archive as an ever-expanding garage sale where the mess is part of the charm, Springsteen engages with his past in the present tense. These days, it’s not uncommon for him to write belated lyrics to a vintage instrumental, or revisit 50-year-old songs for a brand new record, or place his 1987 outtake “The Wish” as the emotional centerpiece of his autobiographical Broadway show. “I always picture it as a car,” he explained of his body of work—and what else. “All your selves are in it. And a new self can get in, but the old selves can’t ever get out. The important thing is, who’s got their hands on the wheel at any given moment?”
With Tracks II, we meet a whole cast of new drivers. There’s the tortured, dislocated voice of Streets of Philadelphia Sessions, the much-mythologized 1994 record that pairs downtrodden tales of distance and doubt with drum loops and dreamy synths that occasionally border on trip-hop. There’s the sophisticated, lovesick crooner who favors major-seventh chords and swooning tempos on Twilight Hours, a recent gem written at the same time as 2019’s Western Stars. There’s even a record where Springsteen leads a mariachi band—on Inyo, he sings translations of Spanish poetry, tells the tale of the California water wars, and cites in the credits a book called The Mexican Corrido: A Feminist Analysis. While these selections might make Tracks II sound like a fans-only buffet of curios, the magic is in how much it all plays to his strengths, how intuitively these outliers stand among the classics.
Consider Faithless, a score and soundtrack he composed for a mid-2000s “spiritual Western” film that never got made. (“That’s the movie business for you,” he jokes in the liner notes.) It’s by far the quietest, starkest music here—mostly Springsteen with a piano or detuned acoustic guitar, repeating chant-like lyrics that wouldn’t sound out of place in a Carter Family gospel song. He wrote the whole thing on a quick visit to Florida with his daughter, and you’d be forgiven for imagining it as a minor, late-career lark. And yet, has Springsteen ever written a love song as open-hearted as “God Sent You”? Has his voice ever sounded as gnarled and twisted as it does in “All God’s Children”? Seemingly drawing inspiration from then-recent work by Tom Waits and the decade’s boom of moody, heartland indie-rock bearing his influence, these pieces adds new depth to his 21st-century songbook alongside the communal prayers of The Rising, the subdued story-songs of Devils & Dust, and the impromptu folk jams of We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions.
Other music recasts his imperial phase in a newly vulnerable light. LA Garage Sessions ’83 emerged just ahead of his commercial peak, during the productive stretch from Nebraska to Born in the U.S.A. that spawned both his bleakest transmissions and most enduring hits. Bridging the two by augmenting his love of Suicide with a growing interest in synths, it’s a cherished bootleg among Springsteen fans—the War on Drugs have been known to whip out a mean cover of “Unsatisfied Heart”—and finally getting to hear it in remastered form only affirms its stature. In this new context, you can hear could-have-been classics like “Follow That Dream” and “Sugarland” beside experiments like “The Klansman” and “One Love” as early stabs at finding a voice outside the E Street Band: If Nebraska was the accidental masterpiece, this was the intentional left turn, paving the way for a decade of work that wrestled subtly against expectations. (“We love you,” shouted a fan at a 1990 solo gig. “But you don’t really know me,” the 41-year-old songwriter muttered in response.)
Accordingly, the most essential music is rarely the most familiar, although the blast of harmonica and acoustic guitar that introduces “Under a Big Sky,” an atmospheric highlight on the 1995 country set Somewhere North of Nashville, hits like the scent from an old friend’s childhood home drifting along the breeze. You can see why some of Perfect World, a sturdy set of mid-tempo rock songs compiled specifically for this box set, might have been passed over for more distinctive material from its era. And you can see why Somewhere North of Nashville—a lighthearted collection that includes a cover song (Johnny Rivers’ “Poor Side of Town”), several countrified renditions of Born in the U.S.A. B-sides (my favorite: “Janey Don’t You Lose Heart”), and a silly suite of rockabilly rave-ups called “Repo Man,” “Detail Man,” and “Delivery Man”—stayed on the shelf at a pivotal moment in his career.
Other albums play like emotional breakthroughs. This is where Streets of Philadelphia Sessions comes in. While the music is a triumph—more tender and tuneful than I expected—it also carries the sense of an artist writing himself out of a rut. After a critical and commercial low point in the early ’90s, Springsteen tried to ride the momentum of his Oscar-winning song for the 1993 legal drama Philadelphia, writing further character studies to expand its tragic love story of devotion and decay. In “One Beautiful Morning,” he builds a refrain from a simple vow: “We give our hearts to mystery.” Across several tracks, he tests a lyric comparing love to a disease, dreams of flying but realizes he’s crawling, searches for a lost part of himself in someone’s eyes and winds up feeling more broken. Maybe he was concerned about how this material would be interpreted by his fan base—or his family. It only adds to his tension that these uncharacteristic scenes of a mid-life crisis were shelved at the last minute for an E Street reunion and a lean, mean, 6x platinum Greatest Hits set.
That particular Greatest Hits, as it happens, would become my gateway to Springsteen fandom as a kid in the late ’90s. Since then, I’ve steadily turned to his work for meaning and guidance and shaped my life around a love of music. Would I have followed this same path if he swapped that welcoming overview for this dark unburdening? It’s impossible to say. But I do know that, 30 years later, it’s hitting the spot. The songs I keep coming back to are “The Farewell Party”—a poignant ballad offering dreams of transfiguration and “a life somewhere untouched by our failures”—and “Maybe I Don’t Know You.” That one’s a little simpler: a creeping rocker with a punching-bag drum loop that reminded me of Godflesh the first time I heard it. Across three verses, Springsteen draws noirish drama from a doomed romance, shadowed by changes he can’t put his finger on yet. “Is it something new?/Or just something you always hid?” he asks before reaching the chorus: “Maybe I don’t know you like I thought I did.” Once the initial novelty wears off of this strange, sprawling treasure trove of music, the real revelation begins to surface: After all this time, maybe we’re still just getting to know each other.
