Bruce Springsteen Tracks II Reviewed: The Boss’ Lost Albums Unearthed

Bruce Springsteen - Tracks II: The Lost Albums

★★★★★

COLUMBIA

On April 2, 1994, Bruce Springsteen scored his biggest ever UK singles chart hit, when Streets Of Philadelphia climbed to Number 2. In all, it spent five weeks in the Top 5 and a further two in the Top 10. Written specifically for Jonathan Demme’s landmark Aids movie Philadelphia, this shattering monologue from a dying man also went Top 10 in the US Billboard Hot 100, and proceeded to win four Grammy awards – including Song Of The Year. It had already won the 1994 Academy Award for Best Original Song.

A case can be made for Streets Of Philadelphia as the song that saved Bruce Springsteen’s career. It certainly returned to him a substantial measure of the critical and commercial status he’d lost with the 1989 break-up of the E Street Band and 1992’s lacklustre twin albums Lucky Town/Human Touch. During 1994, Springsteen cut more material from the same cloth as his comeback single: moody songs with drum loops and synthesizers, mostly self-performed at his home studio in Los Angeles, with minimal instrumental augmentation from a small coterie of musicians from his post-E Street ‘other band’. By the end of the year, Bruce had an album in the can and was perfectly equipped to capitalise on Streets Of Philadelphia’s success.

Instead, he summoned the E Street Band for a studio reunion in January 1995 to quickly cook up some bonus tracks for his first Greatest Hits album. Springsteen did reinforce his artistic credentials in late 1995 with The Ghost Of Tom Joad, a spartan journalistic reframing of John Steinbeck’s depression-era folklore into current contexts. But the 1994 recordings, his Streets Of Philadelphia album, or, as fan-lore would soon have it, his ‘hip-hop album’, or his ‘loops album’, his ‘electronica’ album, whatever it was, stayed on the shelf, accruing mythical status simply from the fact that no one had heard it.

Well, hear it now they shall. Streets Of Philadelphia Sessions is one of the seven ‘lost’ albums that comprise Tracks II, the belated and much anticipated follow-up to Springsteen’s previous major vault haul in 1998. In his both his introductory sleevenote to the box set and one of the Erik Flanagan essays accompanying each individual album, Springsteen suggests he decided against releasing SOPS because he wasn’t sure his core fans would accept a moody record of brooding relationship songs driven by synthesizers and programmed drums. “I was experimenting with a genre usually outside my wheelhouse,” he states.

At the risk of suggesting that one of the greatest rock artists of all time got it wrong, the material on SOPS is of such high calibre you have to suspect Bruce’s fans would have coped just fine. Perhaps equally significant, given that reconvening with the E Street Band to tickle up a Greatest Hits was at root a pragmatic commercial move, a clutch of these songs would surely have impacted comparably to his Oscar-winning single. The opening track, Blind Spot, for instance, built around what sounds like a stock hip-hop sample, or the creepy Maybe I Don’t Know You, with Shane Fontayne’s needling guitar flecks, have a similar cold intensity to the best songs on Tunnel Of Love.

Then there’s Waiting On The End Of The World: Springsteen actually recorded this song with the E Street Band at the January 1995 session, and a subsequently leaked version made clear why he thought the song’s insistent waves of tension and release would suit his erstwhile group. Yet his 1994 original is even better, combining siren doom with epic pop smarts to amplify the lyric’s despairing evocation of a consumptive relationship: “We loved each other like a disease.” One Beautiful Morning, meanwhile, breaks with the musical framework with the addition of ‘other band’ drummer Zach Alford and Bassist Tommy Sims, plus Patti Scialfa and soon-to-be E Street Band member Soozie Tyrell for euphoric R.E.M.-like arpeggiations around more lyrical darkness (“No one really knows what happens when someone dies”).

Perhaps Springsteen felt these themes were too similar to Streets Of Philadelphia itself. An alternative view could suggest that congruence is part of their strength. Certainly, from the perspective of 30 years on, this is not the sound of commercial suicide but an artist re-connecting with the pure motives that always drove his greatest work.

While the first Tracks cherry-picked songs from the vast reservoir of unreleased material Springsteen had accrued during 1972-95, this set offers discrete bodies of work, mostly from the subsequent period, that for various reasons Springsteen chose not to release, albeit with a couple of anomalies. Perfect World is an assortment, compiling mostly band-oriented songs from the mid-’90s to the 2010s. Its title track, demoed in 1997, was covered by John Mellencamp in 2023.

There’s a brace of nearly-weres from 2012’s Wrecking Ball, none of which would have tarnished that album, least of all If I Could Only Be Your Lover and Rain In The River, demos subsequently monstered up with Springsteen’s current go-to producer Ron Aniello. The strongest songs here are actually co-writes between Springsteen and his friend Joe Grushecky, the Pittsburgh bar-buster credited by Bruce with helping him relocate his rock voice and whose 1995 album American Babylon Springsteen produced. Grushecky released his own version of Perfect World opener I’m Not Sleeping in 1998, and the supreme E Street Band recording of his Another Thin Line is no less than he deserves.

Tracks II’s other conceptual outlier focuses on the most obsessively studied period of Springsteen’ career. Just reading the title LA Garage Sessions ’83 is likely to give Boss Ultras palpitations, as it locates the mezzanine between 1982’s Nebraska and 1984’s Born In The USA, the soundtrack to Bruce’s great artistic dilemma – an alternate path never taken. Instead of pivoting back to finishing Born In The USA, the E Street Band record he’d begun before releasing its solo demos as a bona fide album, Springsteen spent several months during 1983 recording these 18 songs à la Nebraska, solo, assisted only by his then-guitar tech Mike Batlan, but this time in a room above the garage of his new home in the Hollywood Hills.

Bruce’s first Golden State album sounds bleak as hell, albeit several gear upgrades from Nebraska’s 4-track cassette machine, and with less skeletal arrangements. The songs, however, be they desolate folk balladry (Country Fair), gallows hillbilly rockers (Don’t Back Down) or farm belt lamentation (Sugarland), are equally on the edge. A few will be familiar, either from live performance – Springsteen’s wholesale re-write of Elvis Presley’s Follow That Dream – or re-recorded B-sides Johnny Bye Bye and Shut Out The Light (the pitiless Vietnam homecoming now with two additional verses and a dire twist). My Hometown has slightly different lyrics from the keystone album closer the world would hear the following year. Yet every one has a definitive resonance, none more so than The Klansman, a disturbingly blank-faced account of a boy who discovers his father is a KKK recruiter who wants him to help “wipe this country clean”. Given the fervid current US political climate and Springsteen’s place therein, it will be interesting to see how this one lands.

Musically, LA Garage is riven by the same melancholic railroad moan that washes through Born In The USA’s darker passages, most notably Downbound Train, the lyric for which is explicitly referenced in no less than five of these songs: Seven Tears, Fugitive’s Dream, Black Mountain Ballad, Richfield Whistle and the astonishing Unsatisfied Heart, an arpeggiated drone rocker about a man who can’t live with his guilty past. This song has never been performed by Springsteen, an omission that clearly needled Boss freak Adam Granduciel to the extent he dropped it into a War On Drugs set in 2018. Finally rescued from the murk of bootleg legend, you can only hope Bruce gives it a place on E Street soon.

The remaining lost albums are less intrinsically dramatic – partly because their existence, and therefore absence, wasn’t widely known – yet each brings rewards. Most straightforwardly enjoyable is Somewhere North Of Nashville, which aside from 2010’s You’re Gonna Miss Me When I’m Gone and its closing title track (an alternate version of a song from 2019’s spaced cowboy set Western Stars) is basically the sound of Springsteen and a loose assemblage of buddies cutting loose on some country honk by way of light relief from the simultaneously recorded Ghost Of Tom Joad in 1995. A couple are re-arranged cuts of Born In The USA-era B-sides – Stand On It and the always welcome Janey, Don’t You Lose Heart – while the pick might be Detail Man, a slice of twang-yer-G-string ribaldry that Springsteen debuted live at John Fogerty’s 50th birthday party.

Also in the abandoned partner category is Twilight Hours, comprising songs contemporaneously written with Western Stars but shelved when Springsteen decided their dalliances with Bacharach-mode uptown easy listening might befuddle his audience. Plenty in that audience, however – and a wider constituency beyond – thought Roy Orbison-sings-Jimmy Webb evocations like Sundown were Western Stars’ keepers, and certainly Twilight Hours’ peak moments transcend mere genre exercise. Max Weinberg adds E Street class to the Trains And Boats And Planes-tilting Two Of Us, and David Sancious does likewise for the full-on Bossa Follow The Sun. Including 2001’s saccharine I’ll Stand By You Always, a lullaby Springsteen wrote on spec for the first Harry Potter film and eventually used in 2019’s Blinded By The Light, is an anomaly too far, but at least Bruce sounds like he’s enjoying himself.

Also found amid the Hollywood can is Faithless, the commissioned soundtrack to a film that never got made. Springsteen places the mooted project as a “spiritual Western”, and that’s definitely the musical vibe, both in the abundance of religious imagery (All God’s Children; My Master’s Hand; A Prayer By The River) and the whiffs of Ry Cooder and Tom Waits. Finally, in a similar vein, there’s Inyo, essentially a compilation of 10 thematically related songs spanning 1994-2010, broadly contemporaneous with The Ghost Of Tom Joad and 2005’s Devils & Dust, all of equal calibre to those records’ masterly depictions of immigrant dramas along America’s southern borderline: note the title track’s authorial economy in detailing the scandalous early 1900s battle to bring water to Los Angeles, and Ciudad Juarez’s depiction of drug trafficking across the Rio Grande. As a standalone release, like SOPS and LA Garage ’83, this would rank among Springsteen’s best.

Seven unheard albums and 83 songs makes the first volume’s mere 66 seem miserly. And as every Boss disciple knows, there’s plenty more. The original Tracks was compiled from a pool of 350 unused songs. “I always put them away, but I don’t throw them away,” Springsteen says in the sleevenotes to this mighty flex of his archival muscle. The title track to Perfect World envisages an everyday utopia, where “every stray dog’d find his way”. So don’t wait too long, Bruce: give all those lost dogs a home.

Tracks II: The Lost Albums is out June 27 on Columbia.

BUY HERE: Amazon | Rough Trade | HMV

What’s Inside Tracks II?

Retailing at £295 for the 9-disc vinyl limited edition or just under £260 for the 7-CD set, Tracks II is hardly a casual purchase. As well as the seven albums, the box set includes a 100-page book. For the budget-shopper or the merely curious, Lost And Found is less daunting: a 20-track selection from the motherlode on CD or 2-LP. There are no songs exclusive to the shorter format – unlike when Tracks was followed six months later by 18 Tracks, a primer with three previously unavailable bonus cuts, forcing disgruntled diehards to buy that as well. Cheers, Bruce Inc!

Bruce Springsteen - Tracks II: The Lost Albums: Full Tracklist:

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)

STREETS OF PHILADELHIA 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

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)

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

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

TWIGHLIGHT 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

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

Get the latest issue of MOJO for the definitive verdict on all the month’s essential new releases, reissues, music books and films. More info and to order a copy HERE!

Picture: Aaron Rapaport/Cobis via Getty Images