Bruce Springsteen to release seven ‘lost’ albums
Bruce Springsteen is throwing open his archives to let fans hear seven completed, but never-before-released, albums.
The recordings, which date from 1983 to 2018, will “fill in rich chapters of Springsteen’s expansive career timeline – while offering invaluable insight into his life and work as an artist,” said Sony Music.
Among them are working tapes from the sessions that led to rock classic Born In The USA, and an album that experimented with drum loops and synthesisers from the early 1990s.
“I’ve played this music to myself and often close friends for years now,” Springsteen said in a statement. “I’m glad you’ll get a chance to finally hear them. I hope you enjoy them.”
The music will be revealed on a box set of seven CDs (or nine vinyl discs), titled Tracks II: The Lost Albums.
The scale of the release is quite different from its predecessor, Tracks, whose four discs collected random off-cuts and b-sides from the first 25 years of Springsteen’s career.
According to a press release, Tracks II will feature 83 songs, of which 74 have never been officially released in any form.
Many of the tracks, including Fugitive’s Dream and Don’t Back Down on Our Love, have circulated on bootlegs for years, but will finally be heard in studio quality.
Springsteen said the release had been made possible when the Covid-19 pandemic allowed him to “finish everything I had in my vault”.
Fans have known for years that Springsteen’s vault contains hours and hours of unheard material.
Speaking to Variety magazine in 2017, the star admitted: “We’ve made many more records than we released. Why didn’t we release those records? I didn’t think they were essential.
“I might have thought they were good, I might have had fun making them… but over my entire work life, I felt like I released what was essential at a certain moment, and what I got in return was a very sharp definition of who I was, what I want to do, what I was singing about.
“And I still basically judge what I’m doing by the same set of rules.”
In a video trailer for Tracks II, Springsteen added: “I often read about myself in the ’90s as having some lost period or something.
“And I really, really was working the whole time.”
First track released
Fans will finally get to hear those “lost” songs in June.
Springsteen said they would offer a glimpse into the home recordings he made after the commercial success of Born To Run and Born In The USA freed him from the pressure of using commercial recording studios.
“The ability to record at home whenever I wanted allowed me to go into a wide variety of different musical directions,” he said in a statement.
That includes the “sonic experimeentation” of Faithless, a film soundtrack to a movie that never got made.
Other unreleased albums include the country-leaning Somewhere North of Nashville, cut in May 1995; and Twilight Hours, an orchestrated pop album that was written and recorded in the same period as 2018’s Western Stars.
There are also the “richly-woven border tales” of Inyo, whose song titles – including The Aztec Dance and Ciudad Juarez – suggest a Latin American influence.
Springsteen described the last disc, Perfect World, as “the one thing on this that wasn’t initially conceived as an album”, instead highlighting several songs he wrote with longtime collaborator Joe Grushecky in the 1990s and early 2000s.
As a first taste of the collection, he released Rain In The River, from Perfect World, whose muscular drums and squalling feedback showcase the raw power of his regular backing band E Street Band.
The announcement comes a month before Springsteen kicks off his European tour, with dates in Manchester, Liverpool, Marseille, Berlin and Prague, amongst others.
The 75-year-old recently vowed to keep playing live “until the wheels come off”, but said he had scaled back his tours after his wife, Patti Scialfa, was diagnosed with myeloma, a rare blood cancer.
