Bruce Springsteen's Colossal <em>'Tracks II</em> Is Needlessly Unwieldy—But It's Still a Revelation
It was already shaping up to be a big year for Bruce Springsteen. This summer marks the 50thanniversary of his breakthrough album Born to Run, and the biopic Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere opens in the fall, with The Bear’s Jeremy Allen White portraying The Boss as he grapples with his daring and experimental 1982 record Nebraska. And that was before Springsteen made international headlines when he opened his European tour last month with several heroic speeches asserting that America is “currently in the hands of a corrupt, incompetent, and treasonous administration” and facing “the abuses of an unfit president and a rogue government.”
But if we weren’t already evaluating and reevaluating his career enough, now a remarkable and colossal project has entered the chat—a box set called Tracks II: The Lost Albums. It’s a sequel of sorts to the 1998 Tracks collection, which compiled four CDs’ worth of studio outtakes that piled up over the years. Unlike that set, though, the new box consists of seven complete, unreleased albums: a total of 83 songs, which instantly increases Springsteen’s lifetime recorded output by about 25 percent in one fell swoop.
For fans, this is a historic, consistently impressive, and genuinely revelatory project. It’s also overwhelming, a needlessly unwieldy way to treat this crucial body of work.
Consider just how unprecedented this compilation really is. Bob Dylan pioneered this kind of retrospective release with his ongoing “Bootleg Series,” but no self-contained, previously unreleased Dylan album has yet surfaced. Obsessive archivist Neil Young seems to put out old material every month, but mostly focuses on live recordings and alternate takes, and while the Prince vault has cracked open enough to reveal a full album like 2021’s Welcome 2 America, we haven’t yet gotten anything like the flood of recordings Springsteen has unleashed here.
Bruce Springsteen in 1982.
These songs span the years from 1983 to 2018, though the core of the collection are three albums recorded in the mid-1990s: Streets of Philadelphia Sessions (largely solo recordings built around drum loops), the old-school country flavored Somewhere North of Nashville, and the Mexican tinged border meditations of Inyo. These are bracketed by the LA Garage Sessions ’83 and two 21st century efforts—Faithless, a soundtrack to a never-made film, and the orchestral pop of Twilight Hours. (Finally, there’s Perfect World, which gathers up stray recordings across the decades along the lines of the first Tracks set.)
What immediately stands out about all these albums is how serious and resolute they are. Springsteen’s sense of purpose and creative intent is hardly news, but any concern that these are half-assed or casual efforts disappear on a first listen. Not everything feels finished, certainly not polished to perfection, but each of the Lost Albums reveals an artist chasing an idea, committing to a direction, wherever it wound up leading him.
For less-obsessive Bruce fans, the LA Garage Sessions set is the selection of most obvious interest. Having relocated to California, and feeling liberated by recording Nebraska on his own, Springsteen was wrestling with his next move—which turned out to be, despite mixed emotions he expresses to this day, the world-conquering Born in the U.S.A. At 18 tracks, this is the longest of the Lost Albums, emphasizing the explosion of creativity he was harnessing at this landmark juncture. (It also should not be confused with the mythic “Electric Nebraska” sessions, the existence of which Bruce oddly denied and then confirmed in a recent Rolling Stone interview.)
The 1990s are understood to be a bit of a lost decade in the Bruce Springsteen story; between 1987 and 2002, he released only the unloved 1992 twin set of Human Touch and Lucky Town and 1995’s spare, acoustic The Ghost of Tom Joad. This box, though, tells a very different tale of productivity and exploration.
Streets of Philadelphia Sessions (named for the Oscar-winning song that first saw Springsteen working with a drum machine as the foundation for a track) is the most fully realized of these records, and the one that apparently came closest to an actual release. The early-generation rhythm loops get a bit same-sounding after a while, but there’s a clear and distinctive mood to this set of songs; maybe too much so, since Springsteen explains that it would have been a fourth straight “really dark album about relationships,” which led to his pumping the brakes.
Somewhere North of Nashville, heavy on fiddle and pedal steel guitar, was cut concurrently with The Ghost of Tom Joad, and while it may lack the gravity of that album, it’s quite a bit more fun—the lightest-hearted of the seven records, and in some ways a precursor to the joyous 2006 We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions hoedown. Inyo is subtler, gorgeous in some spots and dull in others, teeing up some of the sounds and themes that would surface on 2005’s Devils and Dust and personifying immigrant stories and struggles in ways that ring out even louder today.
It's hard to know what to make of Faithless, the shortest of the Lost Albums and the most mysterious; not a frame was shot of the movie for which this music was intended, so we’re left to piece together the meanings of the spiritual images, Southern border gospel arrangements, and airy instrumentals. The biggest surprise may be Twilight Hours, recorded as a companion to 2019’s Western Stars. Where that under appreciated album drew from the cowboy pop of Jimmy Webb and Glen Campbell, though, Twilight is more purely Mad Men-era, shimmering Burt Bacharach-inspired MOR, with Springsteen displaying unexpected vocal range on some real beauties like “Sunday Love” and “High Sierra.”
And let’s pause there for a second and talk about Springsteen’s voice. We all have the cartoon version in our head, the jacked-up-to-bursting “one-two-three-faugh!” growl, but stacking these albums up, he brings a different approach to his singing to each one. It’s an easily overlooked element of his work, but if the Lost Albums all represent paths not taken, they also reinforce the ways Springsteen retains and refines ideas and methods as his career has evolved.
At this point, Bruce Springsteen is defined primarily as a performing artist. He hasn’t had an album certified platinum since 2007 and his streaming numbers can be shockingly low, but he still fills stadiums with delirious fans around the world. The difference is largely the juggernaut known as the E Street Band, which gives a sense of camaraderie and exultation to even the most tortured of his compositions (yes, including the hits—you ever think how strange it is to hear tens of thousands of people singing the lyrics to “Hungry Heart” or “Dancing in the Dark?”). That unit, though, is entirely absent on this collection, beyond some scattered parts from individual band members, further emphasizing the overall sense of darkness and isolation.
Tracks II confirms just how self-critical and carefully curated Springsteen has always been. That was the clear takeaway from the first Tracks box—unlike, most notably, Bob Dylan, who has often left his best songs off of his records, it was pretty clear listening to Springsteen’s outtakes that he almost always made the right call. You can understand why none of these Lost Albums came out, though you could also make a case for why any one of them should have.
And that precise and unerring sense of editing makes the choice to dump all this material at once even more mystifying. This is important, if imperfect work; the context matters a lot and requires some time and effort to absorb. The package’s notes, with Springsteen walking writer Erik Flannigan through each album, lay out the facts well, but seriously, what’s the rush?
Why not release them separately as a series, or make the “Missing Years” ‘90s albums its own thing, or combine the country-leaning records or the echoing territory of Inyo and Faithless? Are we supposed to consider these seven discs as one big chunk of a career or devote attention to each one on its own? Who, even among the most dedicated fans, really has that time? The price point is also inexplicable—a $300 list price for seven CDs ($350 for the nine-LP version) works out to around $40 per disc.
I know the guy is 75 years old (and claims, incredibly, to have another five unreleased albums set aside for an upcoming Tracks III set), but why not give listeners the chance to really investigate and understand this music, to tease out where each project came from and what it led to, rather than make them sprint through five-and-a-half hours that substantially alters the story of such a towering figure? Bruce, we all know you were born to run—but maybe you could slow down enough that we can really cover your tracks.
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