It’s not every day that Bruce Springsteen releases seven albums at the same time — 83 songs in all, going back over 40 years. But there’s never been an archival project with the same crazed ambition of his new box, Tracks II: The Lost Albums. His 1998 Tracks was a crate-digging collection of vault gems that fans had spent years praying for — or hoarding on bootlegs. But Tracks II is a whole different ballgame: seven unreleased albums Springsteen made, trying out various genres and voices, spanning from 1983 to 2018. Each one of these albums is a moment in time; each one is a story on its own. But the whole damn thing is a treasure trove.
Tracks II is full of revelations because no artist has ever topped Springsteen’s genius as an album-crafter — not just the songwriting, but the painstaking way he weaves these tunes into longform stories, piece by piece. Nobody’s ever had his flair for album-openers — “Thunder Road,” “Nebraska,” “We Take Care of Our Own”— or closers — “Darkness on the Edge of Town,” “I’ll See You In My Dreams,” “Valentine’s Day.” Nobody’s got his ear for the subtle architectural details — “Hungry Heart” into “Out in the Street” is the ultimate “double whammy to kick off Side Two,” just as “Racing in the Street” is the ultimate “slow sad one at the end of Side One.”
So Tracks II is dazzling not just for the abundance of previously unheard songs, but for how he’s built them into albums, including great ones like Inyo or Twilight Hour, or country and hip-hop experiments. Some of these records were seemingly finished and ready to go, except he decided to keep them on the shelf. Hell, every artist has “lost songs” — but what kind of madman has this many full-fledged Lost Albums? Only this guy.
It’s a lot of music to take in. For comparison, he’s released nine albums in the past 25 years (two of them devoted to covers) so he’s just doubled his 21st century output. He’s got a sampler called Lost and Found, which has 20 superbly chosen highlights. But the point of Tracks II is engaging it on Springsteen’s terms — as individual albums, each with its own place in his story.
Most of this music comes from the Nineties, the weirdest phase of his career — his infamous wilderness years. He ditched the E Street Band and fled to L.A., of all places, to start over. But for the first and only time, he was struggling to make an emotional connection with listeners. Without his rhythm section, his E Street audience got split down the middle by grunge and country, as Bruce got outflanked by Garth Brooks on the right and Eddie Vedder on the left. “I just felt kind of ‘Bruced out,’” he told Rolling Stone in a bombshell 1992 interview. “I was like, ‘Whoa. Enough of that.’”
Most rock stars of his generation had their lost decade in the Eighties, floundering through the era of shoulder pads, MTV, and video-game album covers, then got their mojo back in the Nineties. But leave it to Bruce to do it the other way around — in the Spandex Decade, he had one of the hottest hot streaks any artist’s ever enjoyed. His Eighties run was so packed with highlights, the world is still catching up. If we get a whole Hollywood movie about Nebraska, does this mean we can also get movies about Tunnel of Love, the making of the “I’m On Fire” video, or the day Bruce and Little Steven got thrown out of Disneyland by security goons because Steve refused to take off his babushka?
But for reasons nobody understood at the time, he entered his Bruced Out era, missing out on the Nineties rock boom. He released three albums, yet none clicked. As we know now, he kept making music, but in the outside world, it looked like he was semi-retired. He even said living in New Jersey was “like Santa Claus at the North Pole,” and he knew exactly how inflammatory those words would be — it was his Plastic Ono Band “I don’t believe in Jersey” moment. A rough time to be a fan, but he came back stronger than ever with his 1999 E Street Band reunion tour and The Rising; the man hasn’t come close to a dud album since. So what happened in between?
That’s one of the main reasons Tracks II exists — he wants to tell the story of his missing years. “I often read about myself in the Nineties as having some lost period or something,” he said in his album announcement. “Not really. Really, I was working the whole time.” Five of these seven Lost Albums chronicle that decade — he’s really out to bury the image of the Nineties as the era of the Boss on the sidelines in a cast.
The earliest is L.A. Garage Sessions ’83, in the aftermath of his bold folkie detour Nebraska. “I was still a little gun-shy of fame,” he admits in the notes. “I was unsure whether to immediately release Born in the U.S.A. after Nebraska.” Despite the title, there’s no Nuggets-style garage band—it’s the opposite, a man in retreat from his group, making solo demos in his home studio with an engineer. It’s full of close-up character studies in the mode of Nebraska (“Jim Dear” and “Richfield Whistle,” both close to “Highway Patrolman”) or Born in the U.S.A. (the heartland angst of “Sugarland” and “Don’t Back Down on Our Love”). It feels like a bridge between these two blood-brother albums, the Sergeant Joe and Frankie of his catalog.
“Shut Out the Light,” one of the toughest songs of his life, was the B-side of the “Born in the U.S.A.” single, but this version has a lost extra verse about the Vietnam vet’s drug addiction. “Follow That Dream” is an Elvis tribute (named after one of the King’s flat-out worst movies), a longtime concert fave that finally gets a studio version here.
But this was the Eighties, when Springsteen had the golden touch. It’s the Nineties where he lost his footing, and that’s where Tracks II gets wild and fascinating. Streets of Philadelphia Sessions is a light genre exercise, devoted to drum loops and electronics, inspired by West Coast hip-hop. The very mid-Nineties sound is Springsteen exploring new beats, like most of his peers; this was the era of Paul McCartney’s techno project The Fireman, Bowie’s drum-and-bass album, and the Stones sampling Biz Markie. (It was practically illegal for a veteran rocker NOT to make a loops album.) But it’s got songwriting strokes like the poignant “One Beautiful Morning” and “The Farewell Party.”
The biggest find on Tracks II is Inyo, a portrait of the California badlands, set in border towns, desert roads, and aqueducts, with the heavy influence of mariachi bands. The songs were mostly written as he was driving near Yosemite or Death Valley, in the late Nineties. Inyo has musical connections with Tom Joad and Devils and Dust, yet it hits even deeper than either. The high points are when he goes full mariachi, for sentimental yet powerfully elegiac laments like “Adelita,” “The Lost Charro,” and “The Aztec Dance,” where the spirits of Montezuma and Cuauhtémoc seem to appear in the shadow of a strip-mall Pizza Hut.
Somewhere North of Nashville is a country romp banged out “on a whim,” as he says, in the summer of 1995 — he cut it in the afternoons for kicks, while working on the much darker The Ghost of Tom Joad. It’s an experiment that’s oddly insular, considering how Springsteen was the most influential artist in country at the time, with Garth, Clint Black, Joe Diffie, and so many others doing Bruce-style rock to feed the heartland’s gigantic Springsteen craving. (Just to pick the most obvious example, Billy Ray Cyrus became an overnight Nashville superstar with his faux-Boss smash “Achy Breaky Heart,” which was the same damn song as “Pink Cadillac.”)
Twilight Hours is a brilliant companion album to Western Stars, written at the same time (mostly 2011), exploring the same L.A. orchestral pop theme, twisting the bittersweet chords of Jimmy Webb, Henry Mancini, or Burt Bacharach. “Sunday Love” is a lush portrait of romantic agony — hope Brian Wilson got to hear this at least once before the final curtain. If you love Western Stars — an acclaimed masterwork at the time, yet one that just keeps sounding better over the years — he leans even harder into his crooner moves, going for Frank Sinatra/Al Martino smoothness in torch ballads like “Dinner at Eight” and “Sunliner.” The cocktail-noir drama “High Sierra” is one of the box’s absolute peaks—he’s a Bogart or Mitchum on the run from a past he can never escape, with debts no honest man can pay.
Faithless is a “spiritual Western,” his atmospheric soundtrack for a Hollywood movie that never happened. Perfect World is the one cheat here — it’s just a collection of stray songs, not an album he ever envisioned as a unit. But it’s the right place to park loosies like “If I Could Only Be Your Lover” — a soulful lament too worldly to fit with the ghost stories on Wrecking Ball — or the mid-Nineties bangers “Rain in the River” and “I’m Not Sleeping.” “It’s the only piece here not originally conceived as its own record,” he says of Perfect World. “I wanted just a little fun, noise, and rock & roll to finish the package.”
Tracks II is overpowering in its sheer abundance — you can spend entire weeks exploring these albums. It’s loaded with songs that any other artists would have jumped at the chance to release—but not this guy, because good as they were, they just didn’t fit into his overarching plan of the lifelong story he wanted to tell.
That’s why Tracks II ends up being a tribute to Bruce Springsteen’s stubborn streak, which has been on fine display all year. If you’ve been following him lately, you know he’s great at making himself a pain in the ass when he chooses, and right now he chooses — he’s one of the most reliably ornery voices speaking out about this moment in American history, just as he was in the damn Eighties when Reagan tried to embrace him. It shouldn’t have been his job then, just as it shouldn’t be now, but he’s out there doing it. (Bruce has always had flawless taste in enemies.) Only an artist with that kind of obstinate integrity could have assembled seven albums this great, but decided not to release any of them. For any fan, it’s a revelation to hear the secret mischief that Bruce Springsteen was making in the shadows, during his most low-profile era — the music he made for himself, after years of making music for the world.
