{"id":200219,"date":"2025-06-20T15:44:10","date_gmt":"2025-06-20T15:44:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/200219\/"},"modified":"2025-06-20T15:44:10","modified_gmt":"2025-06-20T15:44:10","slug":"the-lost-albums-is-an-epic-chronicle-of-his-missing-years","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/200219\/","title":{"rendered":"The Lost Albums’ Is an Epic Chronicle of His Missing Years"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tIt\u2019s not every day that Bruce Springsteen<\/a> releases seven albums at the same time \u2014 83 songs in all, going back over 40 years. But there\u2019s 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 \u2014 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.<\/p>\n

\n\tTracks II is full of revelations because no artist has ever topped Springsteen\u2019s genius as an album-crafter \u2014 not just the songwriting, but the painstaking way he weaves these tunes into longform stories, piece by piece. Nobody\u2019s ever had his flair for album-openers \u2014 \u201cThunder Road,\u201d \u201cNebraska,\u201d \u201cWe Take Care of Our Own\u201d\u2014 or closers \u2014 \u201cDarkness on the Edge of Town,\u201d \u201cI\u2019ll See You In My Dreams,\u201d \u201cValentine\u2019s Day.\u201d Nobody\u2019s got his ear for the subtle architectural details \u2014 \u201cHungry Heart\u201d into \u201cOut in the Street\u201d is the ultimate \u201cdouble whammy to kick off Side Two,\u201d just as \u201cRacing in the Street\u201d is the ultimate \u201cslow sad one at the end of Side One.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tSo Tracks II is dazzling not just for the abundance of previously unheard songs, but for how he\u2019s 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 \u201clost songs\u201d \u2014 but what kind of madman has this many full-fledged Lost Albums? Only this guy.<\/p>\n

\n\tIt\u2019s a lot of music to take in. For comparison, he\u2019s released nine albums in the past 25 years (two of them devoted to covers) so he\u2019s just doubled his 21st century output. He\u2019s got a sampler called Lost and Found, which has 20 superbly chosen highlights. But the point of Tracks II is engaging it on Springsteen\u2019s terms \u2014 as individual albums, each with its own place in his story.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\t\tEditor\u2019s picks<\/p>\n

\n\tMost of this music comes from the Nineties, the weirdest phase of his career \u2014 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. \u201cI just felt kind of \u2018Bruced out,\u2019\u201d he told Rolling Stone<\/a> in a bombshell 1992 interview. \u201cI was like, \u2018Whoa. Enough of that.\u2019\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tMost 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 \u2014 in the Spandex Decade, he had one of the hottest hot streaks any artist\u2019s 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 \u201cI\u2019m On Fire\u201d video, or the day Bruce and Little Steven got thrown out of Disneyland <\/a>by security goons because Steve refused to take off his babushka?\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tBut 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 \u201clike Santa Claus at the North Pole,\u201d and he knew exactly how inflammatory those words would be \u2014 it was his Plastic Ono Band \u201cI don\u2019t believe in Jersey\u201d 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\u2019t come close to a dud album since. So what happened in between?\u00a0<\/p>\n

\t\tRelated Content<\/p>\n

\n\tThat\u2019s one of the main reasons Tracks II exists \u2014 he wants to tell the story of his missing years. \u201cI often read about myself in the Nineties as having some lost period or something,\u201d he said in his album announcement. \u201cNot really. Really, I was working the whole time.\u201d Five of these seven Lost Albums chronicle that decade \u2014 he\u2019s really out to bury the image of the Nineties as the era of the Boss on the sidelines in a cast.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe earliest is L.A. Garage Sessions \u201983, in the aftermath of his bold folkie detour Nebraska. \u201cI was still a little gun-shy of fame,\u201d he admits in the notes. \u201cI was unsure whether to immediately release\u00a0Born in the U.S.A.\u00a0after\u00a0Nebraska.\u201d Despite the title, there\u2019s no Nuggets-style garage band\u2014it\u2019s the opposite, a man in retreat from his group, making solo demos in his home studio with an engineer. It\u2019s full of close-up character studies in the mode of Nebraska (\u201cJim Dear\u201d and \u201cRichfield Whistle,\u201d both close to \u201cHighway Patrolman\u201d) or Born in the U.S.A. (the heartland angst of \u201cSugarland\u201d and \u201cDon\u2019t Back Down on Our Love\u201d). It feels like a bridge between these two blood-brother albums, the Sergeant Joe and Frankie of his catalog.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cShut Out the Light,\u201d one of the toughest songs of his life, was the B-side of the \u201cBorn in the U.S.A.\u201d single, but this version has a lost extra verse about the Vietnam vet\u2019s drug addiction. \u201cFollow That Dream\u201d is an Elvis tribute (named after one of the King\u2019s flat-out worst movies), a longtime concert fave that finally gets a studio version here.<\/p>\n

\n\tBut this was the Eighties, when Springsteen had the golden touch. It\u2019s the Nineties where he lost his footing, and that\u2019s 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\u2019s techno project The Fireman, Bowie\u2019s 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\u2019s got songwriting strokes like the poignant \u201cOne Beautiful Morning\u201d and \u201cThe Farewell Party.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tThe 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 \u201cAdelita,\u201d \u201cThe Lost Charro,\u201d and \u201cThe Aztec Dance,\u201d where the spirits of Montezuma and Cuauht\u00e9moc seem to appear in the shadow of a strip-mall Pizza Hut.<\/p>\n

\n\tSomewhere North of Nashville is a country romp banged out \u201con a whim,\u201d as he says, in the summer of 1995 \u2014 he cut it in the afternoons for kicks, while working on the much darker The Ghost of Tom Joad. It\u2019s an experiment that\u2019s 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\u2019s gigantic Springsteen craving. (Just to pick the most obvious example, Billy Ray Cyrus became an overnight Nashville superstar with his faux-Boss smash \u201cAchy Breaky Heart,\u201d which was the same damn song as \u201cPink Cadillac.\u201d)\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tTwilight 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. \u201cSunday Love\u201d is a lush portrait of romantic agony \u2014 hope Brian Wilson got to hear this at least once before the final curtain. If you love Western Stars \u2014 an acclaimed masterwork at the time, yet one that just keeps sounding better over the years \u2014 he leans even harder into his crooner moves, going for Frank Sinatra\/Al Martino smoothness in torch ballads like \u201cDinner at Eight\u201d and \u201cSunliner.\u201d The cocktail-noir drama \u201cHigh Sierra\u201d is one of the box\u2019s absolute peaks\u2014he\u2019s a Bogart or Mitchum on the run from a past he can never escape, with debts no honest man can pay.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tFaithless is a \u201cspiritual Western,\u201d his atmospheric soundtrack for a Hollywood movie that never happened. Perfect World is the one cheat here \u2014 it\u2019s just a collection of stray songs, not an album he ever envisioned as a unit. But it\u2019s the right place to park loosies like \u201cIf I Could Only Be Your Lover\u201d \u2014 a soulful lament too worldly to fit with the ghost stories on Wrecking Ball \u2014 or the mid-Nineties bangers \u201cRain in the River\u201d and \u201cI\u2019m Not Sleeping.\u201d \u201cIt\u2019s the only piece here not originally conceived as its own record,\u201d he says of Perfect World. \u201cI wanted just a little fun, noise, and rock & roll to finish the package.\u201d<\/p>\n

\t\tTrending Stories<\/p>\n

\n\tTracks II is overpowering in its sheer abundance \u2014 you can spend entire weeks exploring these albums. It\u2019s loaded with songs that any other artists would have jumped at the chance to release\u2014but not this guy, because good as they were, they just didn\u2019t fit into his overarching plan of the lifelong story he wanted to tell.<\/p>\n

\n\tThat\u2019s why Tracks II ends up being a tribute to Bruce Springsteen\u2019s stubborn streak, which has been on fine display all year. If you\u2019ve been following him lately, you know he\u2019s great at making himself a pain in the ass when he chooses, and right now he chooses \u2014 he\u2019s 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\u2019t have been his job then, just as it shouldn\u2019t be now, but he\u2019s 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\u2019s a revelation to hear the secret mischief that Bruce Springsteen was making in the shadows, during his most low-profile era \u2014 the music he made for himself, after years of making music for the world.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It\u2019s not every day that Bruce Springsteen releases seven albums at the same time \u2014 83 songs in…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":200220,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3936],"tags":[7627,77,269,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-200219","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-music","8":"tag-bruce-springsteen","9":"tag-entertainment","10":"tag-music","11":"tag-uk","12":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114716466551757166","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/200219","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=200219"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/200219\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/200220"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=200219"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=200219"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=200219"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}