Get Lost in Bruce Springsteen’s Tracks II: The Lost Albums

Bruce Springsteen dropped a bombshell on April Fool’s Day. Though it would’ve been uncharacteristically cruel of the Boss to toy with fans, it still seemed too good to be true: After years of anticipation and rumors, the long-awaited sequel to his 1998 box set Tracks is finally arriving.

For much of the 21st century, Springsteen has alternated between furious bursts of new releases and legacy management. For a period of time, he seemed content to put a bow on his hallowed mythos before reviving the E Street Band for 2020’s Letter to You, chasing it with a soul-covers album called Only the Strong Survive in 2022 and soldiering through a globe-trotting tour despite multiple setbacks related to the pandemic and his own health.

Along the way, Springsteen alluded to more music lying in wait. To the extent we knew much about Tracks II: The Lost Albums at all, it was mostly via die-hard sleuths conversing on Springsteen fan forums. Now that it’s real, let’s try to explain what the hell is going on.

When is Tracks II coming out?

June 27.

What’s included?

The release features seven previously unreleased albums, including 83 songs, 74 never before heard (well, some of them have been available for years as leaks, but we’re just splitting hairs).

Okay, what’s the deal with all these lost albums?

Springsteen is a rigorous self-editor. For much of his career, he recorded far more music than he released, carefully considering what passed the test — not just what had the goods but also which albums fit into a story he wanted to tell. This didn’t make him infallible — duds like Working on a Dream still snuck across the finish line — but he was pretty damn close.

As he allowed more of that unreleased music into the world, it became clear that, beyond his impeccable ’70s to late-’80s run, there were whole counternarratives and alternate histories. Some of these lost albums have been the subject of speculation for decades; others remained shrouded in mystery, with little information besides the fact that they supposedly existed.

There’s a lot of reason to be excited for Tracks II based on his past batting average. The first Tracks set featured highlights like “Roulette,” “Rendezvous,” “Frankie,” and “My Love Will Not Let You Down,” to name just a few erstwhile obscurities that have risen to prominence in Springsteen fan lore. Between Tracks and the Darkness on the Edge of Town and River expansions, it became evident that each of those albums could’ve been several other albums.

“Why didn’t we release those records?” Springsteen told Variety in 2017. “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.”

We live in the best of both worlds now. Springsteen’s classic album run remains intact, while we get the chronological gaps filled in. Also, Springsteen’s “good, but not essential” is usually better than most of his peers’ masterpieces.

What else can we expect on Tracks II?

The box set is dated 1983–2018, but it remains unclear exactly how many of these albums are lost ’90s releases and which ones might’ve come later. Ever since archival expansions of Born to Run, Darkness, and River, fans have expected Springsteen would conclude with something around 1982’s Nebraska and 1984’s Born in the U.S.A. While plans for a BITUSA box were denied, it appears we’re getting some version of what would come with such an expansion: the L.A. Garage 1983 Sessions. Many of these songs have floated around as leaked demos for years, like “The Klansman,” “Unsatisfied Heart,” or “County Fair.” (If you dig up these recordings, they basically sound like foundational DNA for the more washed-out synth-Bruce aesthetics later adopted by bands like the War on Drugs.)

With much of the ’70s and ’80s already mined on prior reissues, Tracks II will inevitably focus on the ’90s onwards — which means it’ll be digging into some eras that have historically been considered more fallow, wandering years for Springsteen.

After running out of steam with the uneven 1992 sister albums Lucky Town and Human Touch, Springsteen spent most of the decade raising his kids and tentatively circling a reunion with the E Street Band while searching for new directions. “I often read about myself in the ’90s as having some kind of lost period,” Springsteen said in the Tracks II trailer. “Really, I was working the whole time.” The Ghost of Tom Joad arrived in 1995, but over time, we learned there were supposedly several other albums from this decade that never made it out for one reason or another — various references have cited an entire project based on synths and loops à la “Streets of Philadelphia” and “Secret Garden,” which may or may not be the “relationship” album Springsteen scrapped circa 1994. Tracks II in fact includes those Streets of Philadelphia Sessions, suggesting an experimental Bruce album.

What other surprises are in store?

Mostly good and one bad, based on first impressions. Many fans will be shocked and crestfallen that the fabled “electric Nebraska” is not included here. In 1982, Springsteen released a stark collection of four-track demos, haunted American wasteland tales primarily told with his voice ragged and his acoustic shuddering. But over time, we learned he’d tried to cut the album with the full E Street Band, and based on live renditions of “Atlantic City” or “Reason to Believe,” fans have often salivated at the alternate-dimension Nebraska. The omission is particularly surprising given that The Bear’s Jeremy Allen White is starring in a Springsteen biopic about the making of that very album later this year. (Could we get two major vault drops in 2025? Let’s not get ahead of ourselves.)

Outside of that, things get kind of wild.

After all the speculation through the years, Tracks II features some projects that were previously completely unheard of, and the current lack of details allows a whole lot of theorizing about when and where these albums originated. Faithless is a collection of music Springsteen made for a film that never got made. Perfect World wasn’t an album but something he culled together into a project. Twilight Hours is billed as “orchestra-driven, mid-century noir.” Somewhere North of Nashville shares a title with a song on Western Stars while being described as a country album, but we have no idea whether it’s a continuation or predecessor to that project. Also, what the fuck is Inyo? His Peter Gabriel album? Soon enough, we’ll finally have the answers.

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