{"id":25778,"date":"2025-06-30T00:21:10","date_gmt":"2025-06-30T00:21:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/25778\/"},"modified":"2025-06-30T00:21:10","modified_gmt":"2025-06-30T00:21:10","slug":"bruce-springsteens-tracks-ii-the-lost-albums-a-guide","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/25778\/","title":{"rendered":"Bruce Springsteen’s Tracks II: The Lost Albums: A Guide"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tWhat if Bruce Springsteen<\/a> had followed up his synth-and-drum-machine-driven 1994 hit \u201cStreets of Philadelphia\u201d with a whole album largely in that vein? What if he\u2019d dropped an album of Great American Songbook-style ballads instead of 2017\u2019s Western Stars? Springsteen\u2019s just-released boxed set Tracks II: The Lost Albums<\/a> is packed with seven albums\u2019 worth of alternate realities and musical surprises, offering a reminder of just how much he\u2019s capable of outside of his stadium-shaking work with the E Street Band.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n

\n\tIn the new episode of Rolling Stone Music Now<\/a>, Andy Greene \u2014\u00a0who recently interviewed <\/a>Springsteen about the boxed set \u2014\u00a0joins host Brian Hiatt to dive deep into that trove. To hear the entire\u00a0episode, go here<\/a> for the podcast provider of your choice, listen on Apple Podcasts<\/a> or Spotify<\/a>, or just press play above.\u00a0Here are some highlights:<\/p>\n

\n\tMore than one of the albums were likely shelved because Springsteen couldn\u2019t figure out how to tour them.<\/strong> Springsteen would\u2019ve likely used the same band from his just concluded 1992-93 tour for a Streets of Philadelphia Sessions outing, but whatever their flaws, Human Touch and Lucky Town were full of uptempo rock songs \u2014 the atmospheric newer material was blatantly unsuited to arenas. Twilight Hours, his Burt Bacharach-influenced ballads album, posed a similar issue: Was Springsteen really ready to put on a suit and croon with an orchestra?<\/p>\n

\n\tThe unearthed track \u201cWaiting on the End of the World\u201d was likely Springsteen\u2019s first attempt at a song for the <\/strong>Philadelphia<\/strong> soundtrack.<\/strong>\u00a0 The lyrical similarities, including lines about \u201cwasting away\u201d are too obvious to ignore. Director Jonathan Demme originally asked for a rock anthem to help connect his story with heartland America \u2014 our best guess is that \u201cWaiting on the End of the World\u201d was an attempt to fulfill that assignment.<\/p>\n

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

\n\tThe boxed set\u2019s mysterious Faithless album \u2014\u00a0written for a never-made \u201cspiritual Western\u201d movie\u00a0 \u2014 helps solve a mystery about 2012\u2019s Wrecking Ball.\u00a0 <\/strong>In his book Born to Run, Springsteen writes that two Wrecking Ball tracks \u2014 \u201cShackled and Drawn\u201d and \u201cRocky Ground\u201d \u2014\u00a0came from \u201ca gospel film project I\u2019d been working on.\u201d In 2016, he confirmed <\/a>to Rolling Stone in 2016 that the latter song \u201cwas originally written for a film,\u201d and that he was still \u201csitting on the rest\u201d of the songs. Faithless is almost certainly the collection of songs in question.<\/p>\n

\n\t
The psychological crisis Springsteen went through circa 1983 \u2014\u00a0which will figure heavily in the upcoming biopic Deliver Me From Nowhere \u2014\u00a0 is at the heart of the songs included in L.A. Garage Sessions \u201983.<\/strong> \u201cHe literally had to think about his whole life before he could release \u2018Born in the U.S.A.\u2019 and accept his destiny of pop stardom,\u201d Hiatt says. In the wake of 1982\u2019s Nebraska, which tapped into some dark emotional currents from his childhood, Springsteen realized he had to take a deep look at himself before he could move on \u2014\u00a0you can hear that in the existential weight of songs from \u201cUnsatisfied Heart\u201d to \u201cCounty Fair.\u201d<\/p>\n

Springsteen himself clearly changed his mind about his Nineties output in the process of working on the boxed set.<\/strong> \u201cI often read about myself in the Nineties having some lost period or something,\u201d he said, dismissively, in a recent promo video for the album. But Springsteen himself described the Nineties with those exact words <\/a>in a 2009 Rolling Stone interview with David Fricke.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tSpringsteen\u2019s use of a mariachi sounds on \u201cThe Lost Charro\u201d is inadvertently well-timed to the current commercial boom for Mexican regional music artists like Peso Pluma.<\/strong> The lovely song, from the lost Inyo album, includes a full mariachi band and bears little resemblance to anything else in the Springsteen catalog.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

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

\n\tThe chronology of the albums can get tricky.<\/strong> Most of the songs on Inyo are from 1997-98, but at least a couple were actually recorded in the Western Stars\/Twilight Hours sessions, circa 2012. The largely rockabilly album Somewhere North of Nashville is even more confusing \u2014 the bulk of it was recorded in 1995, but the title track is from the 2010s, while other tracks were written in the Born in the U.S.A. era and re-recorded in \u201995.<\/p>\n

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

\n\tDownload and subscribe to Rolling Stone\u2018s weekly podcast, Rolling Stone Music Now, hosted by Brian Hiatt, on Apple Podcasts<\/a> or Spotify<\/a> (or wherever you get your podcasts). Check out eight years\u2019 worth of episodes in the archive, including in-depth interviews with Mariah Carey, Bruce Springsteen, SZA, Questlove, Halsey, Neil Young, Snoop Dogg, Brandi Carlile, Phoebe Bridgers, Rick Ross, Alicia Keys, the National, Ice Cube, Taylor Hawkins, Willow, Keith Richards, Robert Plant, Dua Lipa, Killer Mike, Julian Casablancas, Sheryl Crow, Johnny Marr, Zara Larsson, Scott Weiland, Kirk Hammett, Coco Jones, Liam Gallagher, Alice Cooper, Fleetwood Mac, Elvis Costello, John Legend, Donald Fagen, Charlie Puth, Phil Collins, Justin Townes Earle, Stephen Malkmus, Sebastian Bach, Tom Petty, Eddie Van Halen, Kelly Clarkson, Pete Townshend, Bob Seger, the Zombies, and Gary Clark Jr. And look for dozens of episodes featuring genre-spanning discussions, debates, and explainers with Rolling Stone\u2019s critics and report<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"What if Bruce Springsteen had followed up his synth-and-drum-machine-driven 1994 hit \u201cStreets of Philadelphia\u201d with a whole album…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":25779,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[4580,171,975,22841,22842,67,132,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-25778","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-rolling-stone-music-now","12":"tag-tracks-ii-the-lost-albums","13":"tag-united-states","14":"tag-unitedstates","15":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/114769460334039777","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25778","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=25778"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25778\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/25779"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=25778"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=25778"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=25778"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}