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Bruce Springsteen / Tracks II: The Lost Albums – reviewed

Seven albums, explored.

By Jamie Atkins

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Bruce Springsteen / Tracks II: The Lost Albums - reviewed by SDE

Ever the showman, Bruce Springsteen knows how to keep his fans wanting more. He hinted at Tracks II in a November 1998 interview with Time. With fans still digesting the 66-track, 4CD Tracks, Springsteen revealed that there was more where his bruised and beautiful 1994 hit ‘Streets Of Philadelphia’ came from, “I got together a lot of samples and loops and started to put this album together… Eventually, I’m going to find a way to get this music out to people.” The legend of Springsteen’s ‘hip-hop’ album grew, flames fanned by 2016 memoir Born To Run (“It was an album centering on men and women and it was dark”) and a 2020 Rolling Stone interview in which he teased fans with news of a Tracks sequel and full “lost albums”. 

Now, on the eve of the release of Tracks II – 83 tracks across seven previously unreleased albums packaged with a hardback book – he’s confirmed that a third volume is around the corner, while revealing the mythic E Street Band ‘Electric Nebraska’ sessions exist, sending Springsteen-centric forums into meltdown. The man knows how to work a crowd.

For now, though, Tracks II. In late 1982, with Nebraska hitting the shelves and the bones of Born In The USA in place, Springsteen embarked upon an epic road trip from New Jersey to his new home in the Hollywood Hills, Los Angeles. As he approached the West Coast he chanced upon a small town fair – an innocuous enough sight which triggered a breakdown, later described in Born To Run. “From nowhere, a despair overcomes me,” Springsteen wrote. “I feel an envy of these men and women and their late-summer ritual, the small pleasures that bind this town together… Right now, all I can think of is that I want to be amongst them, of them, and I know I can’t. I can only watch, that’s what I do, I watch and I record… I feel a deeper anxiety than I’ve ever known. Why here? Why tonight? Thirty-four years later, I still don’t know why.”

The aftershocks can be felt throughout Tracks II. On his arrival in Los Angeles, Springsteen sought professional help and installed a 24-track studio above the garage of his new home. The plan was to mix the upbeat, rock’n’roll material already recorded for Born In The USA. Instead, in early 1983 he set to work on an entirely new set of songs, collected here as LA Garage Sessions ’83. This is the Tracks II set most familiar to fans, thanks to long-circulating bootlegs and versions of the officially released ‘Johnny Bye-Bye’ (B-side of ‘I’m On Fire’, Tracks), ‘County Fair’ (The Essential Bruce Springsteen), ‘My Hometown’ (Born In The USA) and ‘Shut Out The Light’ (B-side of ‘Born In The USA’, Tracks). 

While it’s a stretch to call it a ‘lost album’, it’s a snapshot of a fascinating moment in Springsteen’s career, an unpolished and eclectic collection where upbeat, low-stakes rockers – the Buddy-Holly-without-the-hiccups glee of ‘Little Girl Like You’, the brawny earworm ‘One Love’, ‘Don’t Back Down’s surf-rock plea for reassurance – mingle with extraordinary songs obsessed with getting under the skin of troubled souls. Poleaxed by his road-trip revelation that fame had made ‘normal’ life an impossibility, Springsteen sang of those struggling with tough times (the E-Street-anthem-in-disguise ‘Sugarland’) and those haunted by their past (the widescreen folk of ‘Black Mountain Ballad’ and the standout track, an unbootlegged take of ‘Unsatisfied Heart’). The man who’d won the hearts of a generation with ‘Born To Run’, a heart-stopping invocation of the endless possibilities of youth, was now exploring the dark side of humanity by putting himself in the shoes of desperate men making choices that put their freedom at stake (the Nebraska-like companion ballads ‘Jim Deer’ and ‘Richfield Whistle’) and blankly recounting the passing down of abhorrent prejudice (the brooding new wave of ‘The Klansman’, which oddly foreshadows Pixies’ ‘Gouge Away’).

While it’s a stretch to call it a ‘lost album’, LA Garage Sessions ’83 snapshot of a fascinating moment in Springsteen’s career

‘County Fair’ is the melancholic heart of the sessions, with Springsteen drawing on his recent experiences to depict what on paper sounds like an idyllic scene of all American contentment – fairground rides and prizes, a local hotshot band, stolen kisses. It’s a simple song with a nagging chorus, not a million miles from, say, ‘Cadillac Ranch’ or ‘Darlington County’. But rather than giving it the rollicking E Street treatment, Springsteen strips it back to a mournful R&B ballad, think the Drifters performing at a wake, delivered in a half-choked up croon. Rather than celebrating a moment of joy, ‘County Fair’ mourns its passing.

In April 1983, Springsteen returned to New York to resume work with the E Street Band on what would become Born In The USA. The only song from LA Garage Sessions ’83 that made the cut was a re-recorded ‘My Hometown’, but the 18 tracks here give us a deeper appreciation of the period of soul searching, loose ends and creativity which prepared him for the storm that was to come. It’s a helluva story, someone should make a film about it… oh, hang on. 

Next up, Tracks II leaps forward to the feverishly anticipated Streets Of Philadelphia Sessions. Over the first six months of 1994, Springsteen took the synths and drum machine working method established by his latest single and used it to record roughly 20 demos. Alongside producers Chuck Plotkin and Jon Landau, he whittled them down before heading into the studio with members of his touring band to flesh out six of the album’s 10 tracks. The album was mixed and ready to go when Springsteen had a change of heart. “It was just, boom,” he writes in the Tracks II sleevenotes, “[Streets Of Philadelphia Sessions] was finished, but it never felt finished to me. So I said, ‘OK, this isn’t going to happen right now. Let’s do something else.” At this point, Landau presumably kicked the E Street equivalent of the Bat-Signal back into life and Springsteen got the old band back together to record a handful of songs for his upcoming Greatest Hits and Streets Of Philadelphia Sessions began gathering dust in the archives.

Springsteen claims that his U-turn was down to a feeling that, after three albums in a row focused on relationships, his audience might not be ready for another. It’s heartening to know that sometimes, even the Boss gets it wrong.

The disappointments and sadnesses of adulthood seep into just about every word and note of Streets Of Philadelphia Sessions.

It’s certainly difficult to imagine audiences prepped by ‘Streets Of Philadelphia’ dismissing material this surely written, sounding this exquisitely gloomy. Maybe ‘I Don’t Know You’ initially catches the listener off guard with beats straight out of ‘When Doves Cry’ before great swathes of doleful synth suggest trouble on the horizon. Meanwhile, Springsteen sounds distant and fraught as his lyrics ask questions of a partner (“What’s that dress you’re wearin’?, I never seen that dress before”) which suggest a deepening divide. It’s a rare thing – a break-up song free of angst or blame, with a dazed sense of indifference and resignation as lives drift apart, which makes it no less heartbreaking. The disappointments and sadnesses of adulthood seep into just about every word and note of Streets Of Philadelphia Sessions.

The slow-burning ‘Something In The Well’ pulls at threads explored back in LA in 1983 – an inability to escape the past? Trauma? Guilt? “Things can seem so safe and sure, you can never really tell,” Springsteen sings as storm clouds of synth and squalling guitar loom ominously around him. Eventually the tainted water supply bursts open, allowing for an unexpected and deftly written detour into magical realism that underlines the strength of the material.

The disappointments and sadnesses of adulthood seep into just about every word and note of Streets Of Philadelphia Sessions. When the E Street Band recorded ‘Waiting On The End Of The World’ at the following year’s reunion sessions they gave it a breezy rock makeover, but this earlier version accentuates the doomed romance at the heart of the song. Elsewhere, ‘We Fell Down’ is a gorgeous and bittersweet end of the relationship lament studded with evocative details – the sound of the kitchen fridge at 3am, a treasured photograph missing from a book. Even the point on the album where the blinds are opened to let the sunshine in, the uplifting country rocker ‘One Beautiful Morning’, begins as a meditation on mortality. 

Streets Of Philadelphia Sessions might be the major revelation of Tracks II, but his next move brought about another album that makes his ’90s feel that bit more rounded. Somewhere North Of Nashville was recorded alongside the austere folk songs of The Ghost Of Tom Joad, an album that took the previous year’s material as its starting point. “Streets Of Philadelphia got me connected to my socially conscious or topical songwriting,” Springsteen writes in the sleevenotes. “So that’s where The Ghost of Tom Joad came from. But at the same time, I had this country streak that was also running through those sessions and I ended up making a country record on the side.” As you do, if you’re Bruce Springsteen.

Somewhere North Of Nashville offers a real sense of spontaneity with Springsteen sounding as if he’s having the time of his life

Somewhere North Of Nashville was designed as entertainment before work began on Tom Joad’s more serious material in the evening. There’s a real sense of spontaneity with Springsteen sounding as if he’s having the time of his life, growing, whooping and hollering his way through the rambunctious, shit-kicking country-rock of ‘Repo Man’, ‘Tiger Rose’ and ‘Detail Man’. But it’s not all honky tonk hi-jinks, Lou Adler and Johnny Rivers’ ‘Poor Side Of Town’ is recast as a Southern soul belter with one of the stand-out vocal performances of the entire box set, while the bittersweet shrug of ‘Under A Big Sky’ looks ahead to Western Stars. Springsteen also drew upon some old favourites, turning ‘Janey Don’t You Lose Heart’ (B-side of ‘I’m Goin’ Down’) into a lilting country charmer and ‘Stand On It’ (‘Glory Days’ B-side, Tracks) into a bulgy-veined, heads-down roots rocker. 

While touring Tom Joad, Springsteen began work on new material rooted around California and Texas, with a particular interest in the struggles faced by Mexican-American immigrants and Native Americans in the border states. These songs would eventually find a home on Inyo, another fascinating part of the Tracks II jigsaw. “I was enjoying that kind of writing so much,” Springsteen says in the notes. “I would go home to the hotel room at night and continue to write in that style because I thought I was going to follow up The Ghost of Tom Joad with a similar record, but I didn’t. That’s where [Inyo] came from, that and continuing to live on the West Coast at the time. There was constant border reporting in the Los Angeles Times, so it was a big part of your life.” 

Though drawn from across the years, Inyo hangs together brilliantly and is a significant addition to his catalogue.

These are songs unafraid of big issues – the impact on working people of decisions made in the name of power and money, the way that greed can change the physical geography and culture of a place, the exploitation of immigrants. The title track channels Roman Polanski’s Chinatown to document the human cost of the California water wars of the early 20th century which transformed Los Angeles from a drought-ridden small city into a sprawling and prosperous metropolis. There is a callback later in the album, when “the roses rise so perfectly out of the desert floor” for the protagonist of El Jardinero (‘Upon The Death Of Ramon’), a Mexican-American gardener in LA who uses his daily work routine as a mourning ritual for his daughter, killed in a drive-by shooting.

As with Inyo’s spiritual siblings, Tom Joad and Devils & Dust, these are, for the most part, folk songs delivered solo, Woody Guthrie-style. But there are exceptions – the rousing ballad Adelita honours the memory of the soldaderas, the female freedom fighters of the Mexican-American war, while the irresistible ‘The Lost Charro’ finds Springsteen piling on the Mariachi melodrama and ‘One False Move’ dates back to the Streets Of Philadelphia Sessions. Though drawn from across the years, Inyo hangs together brilliantly and is a significant addition to his catalogue.

Faithless is the outlier in Tracks II – an album that remained unreleased for reasons beyond Springsteen’s control. “It was music commissioned for a film that for one reason or another hasn’t been made up to now,” Springsteen explains. “That’s the movie business for you. But I sat with the music for a long time, so, not exactly knowing where the project was going, I decided to release it as a record.”

Recorded in late 2005 and early 2006, between the Devils & Dirt tour and The Seeger Sessions, Faithless finds Springsteen in contemplative folk-gospel mode, with the exception of the stomping, guttural blues ‘All God’s Children’, on which he achieves near-Tom Waits levels of throat-shredding intensity. From the touching, nursey rhyme-like ‘Where You Going Where You From’ to the stately and devout ‘My Master’s Hand’, there is a sense of wide-open space and subtle beauty throughout which gives it a unique place in Springsteen’s catalogue. Though he has been careful not to reveal details of the abandoned film, themes of faith and salvation predominate, and he has used the phrase “spiritual western” to describe the project. Answers on a postcard.

One of the joys of Tracks II is the way that it opens up elements of Springsteen’s artistry only previously hinted at. While 2019’s Western Stars drew upon the influence of Burt Bacharach and Jimmy Webb, it turns out he also had Twilight Hours up his sleeve, an album that dives headfirst into a sumptuous pool of sophisticated orchestrated pop and middle-aged angst, as if soundtracking the non-existent eighth series of Mad Men. “Twilight Hours was written simultaneously with Western Stars,” Springsteen explains in the sleevenotes. “At one time it was either a double record or they were part of the same record. But I separated the Western Stars material out and what I had left is Twilight Hours. I thought the material on Twilight Hours was going to throw people off because it was so intentionally middle of the road.”

It might have been a left-turn, but sumptuous, world-weary ballads of the calibre of ‘Sunday Love’, ‘Late In The Evening’ and ‘September Kisses’ deserved to see the light of day sooner. Meanwhile, ‘Lonely Town’, ‘High Sierra’ and ‘Dinner At Eight’ are cinematic tour de forces that push his writing into new and unexpected places. It’s no lost classic – a few songs drift by without leaving much of an impression and the previously released ‘I’ll Stand By You’ (written for the first Harry Potter film, released on the Blinded By The Light OST) is a schmaltzy stinker too far. 

Perfect World rounds up the set, a collection of latter day off-cuts – think High Hopes 2 – designed to remind fans of his rock credentials. It’s the least essential thing here, though the E Street-esque ‘I’m Not Sleeping’ (“I’m only resting my eyes”) is a wry rock anthem for middle age, ‘If I Could Only Be Your Lover’ smoulders convincingly and the title track ends the set on a reflective note. 

“The joy of these records to me now are their imperfections,” says Springsteen. Tracks II gives us a peak behind the curtain, a glimpse at paths untaken and a deeper appreciation of misunderstood periods of his career. It’s not cheap and not for casual fans, but the already converted will find much to cherish here. Roll on Tracks III….

Review by Jamie Atkins. Tracks II: The Lost Albums is released on Friday, 27 June.

Tracklisting

Tracks II: Lost and Found Bruce Springsteen /

    • CD 1: LA Garage Sessions ’83
      1. Follow That Dream
      2. Don’t Back Down On Our Love
      3. Little Girl Like You
      4. Johnny Bye Bye
      5. Sugarland
      6. Seven Tears
      7. Fugitive’s Dream
      8. Black Mountain Ballad
      9. Jim Deer
      10. County Fair
      11. My Hometown
      12. One Love
      13. Don’t Back Down
      14. Richfield Whistle
      15. The Klansman
      16. Unsatisfied Heart
      17. Shut Out The Light
      18. Fugitive’s Dream (Ballad)
    • CD 2: Streets of Philadelphia Sessions
      1. Blind Spot
      2. Maybe I Don’t Know You
      3. Something In The Well
      4. Waiting On The End Of The World
      5. The Little Things
      6. We Fell Down
      7. One Beautiful Morning
      8. Between Heaven and Earth
      9. Secret Garden
      10. The Farewell Party
    • CD 3: Faithless
      1. The Desert (Instrumental)
      2. Where You Goin’, Where You From
      3. Faithless
      4. All God’s Children
      5. A Prayer By The River (Instrumental)
      6. God Sent You
      7. Goin’ To California
      8. The Western Sea (Instrumental)
      9. My Master’s Hand
      10. Let Me Ride
      11. My Master’s Hand (Theme)
    • CD 4: Somewhere North Of Nashville
      1. Repo Man
      2. Tiger Rose
      3. Poor Side of Town
      4. Delivery Man
      5. Under A Big Sky
      6. Detail Man
      7. Silver Mountain
      8. Janey Don’t You Lose Heart
      9. You’re Gonna Miss Me When I’m Gone
      10. Stand On It
      11. Blue Highway
      12. Somewhere North of Nashville
    • CD 5: Inyo
      1. Inyo
      2. Indian Town
      3. Adelita
      4. The Aztec Dance
      5. The Lost Charro
      6. Our Lady of Monroe
      7. El Jardinero (Upon the Death of Ramona)
      8. One False Move
      9. Ciudad Juarez
      10. When I Build My Beautiful House
    • CD 6: Twilight Hours
      1. Sunday Love
      2. Late in the Evening
      3. Two of Us
      4. Lonely Town
      5. September Kisses
      6. Twilight Hours
      7. I’ll Stand By You
      8. High Sierra
      9. Sunliner
      10. Another You
      11. Dinner at Eight
      12. Follow The Sun
    • CD 7: Perfect World
      1. I’m Not Sleeping
      2. Idiot’s Delight
      3. Another Thin Line
      4. The Great Depression
      5. Blind Man
      6. Rain In The River
      7. If I Could Only Be Your Lover
      8. Cutting Knife
      9. You Lifted Me Up
      10. Perfect World

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