As if 21 albums weren’t enough. Nearly 100 singles. More than 100 live discs. Ten box sets. As if all that weren’t enough, Bruce Springsteen will unleash an avalanche of “new” music this summer.
Tracks II: The Lost Albums isn’t new. It is a vast collection of songs that the Boss has recorded over the years but never formally released on a studio album. Some have become fan-favored from concerts and bootleg recordings. Many have existed as rumors. The overwhelming majority have never been released, even on live or compilation albums.
What makes this so much more than a simple dump of music from the vaults is explained right there in the set’s title. These are indeed “lost albums.” The seven discs represent seven distinct albums from a vast stretch of Springsteen’s prolific career. Between 1983 and 2018, the most iconic of all American rockers conceived of and recorded these seven albums, but for whatever reason, never released them.
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The first taste came on Friday when the first song, “Rain in the River," officially dropped. Lyrically, the song hearkens to many of the troubled romances Springsteen explored during his prolific late 1970s run of epic albums, but with a musical grandiosity that wasn’t often present back then.
“Rain in the River” is from the final lost album—Perfect World—the only one of the seven that Springsteen says was not initially conceived as a coherent unit. Does that mean that it will be more of a hodgepodge collection of songs? Apparently, we won’t know until June 27, when the entire project will be released, but we can speculate.
The title of that final album comes from a Springsteen composition recorded by John Mellencamp for his 2023 album Orpheus Descending. That final disc opens with “I’m Not Sleeping," a song written more than ten years ago by the Boss and his friend Joe Grushecky and performed by Grushecky many times.
Other discs come from more specific periods in Springsteen’s career. The first – LA Garage Sessions ’83 – is easy to figure out. Whether it sheds any new light on two of the most extraordinary albums of the 1980s – Nebraska and Born in the USA – remains to be seen. But these songs were birthed in the same period that created those legendary albums. With 18 songs, it is the longest of the albums contained on Tracks II.
Other lost albums cover the Streets of Philadelphia sessions in 1993, the soundtrack for a never-filmed movie, a country album, the seemingly fallow period between 2014’s High Hopes and 2019’s Western Stars, and Inyo, which he describes in a press release as focusing on “legacies born of separation.” With a series of titles focusing on the southern border, it is hard to imagine that Inyo will not address tales of immigration.
I can’t pretend to know all–or even most–of the titles on Tracks II, but the few I have heard suggest that these songs are far from throwaways or afterthoughts. “Richfield Whistle” has all the gorgeous austerity of the Nebraska era.
“Waiting on the End of the World” (not to be confused with Elvis Costello) is the kind of mid-tempo rock ballad that Springsteen has mastered as well as anyone. And “Janey Don’t You Lose Heart,” the B side of 1985 single “I’m Goin’ Down,” and originally released on Springsteen’s first Tracks collection in 1998, could have easily been a hit.
No one can say why a song like that becomes a radio staple or is destined for the rarities bins in your local vinyl warehouse. In the same way, no one can be entirely sure why these “lost” albums were lost. Fortunately, Bruce Springsteen has the passion and the wherewithal to ensure that such a quality of back catalogue material will not remain lost much longer. Come June 27, fans of the Boss will rejoice in finding 83 old songs anew.