Bruce Springsteen Just Announced A Box Set That Will Recontextualize His Whole Legacy

Originally published on Patreon.

Tracks II, a long-awaited collection of rarities from Bruce Springsteen's vault, is finally coming in June. And while Tracks, originally released in 1998, was a fan-favorite collection of B-sides, unreleased tracks, and other oddities, Tracks II: The Lost Albums will be...something else.

As the title suggests, Tracks II will collect a number of complete albums, some of which were complete or near-complete before Springsteen abandoned them. The songs span from the 1980s through 2018, and the albums were largely completed and remastered during the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown in 2020 and 2021.

"I often read about myself in the '90s as having a 'lost period' or something," Springsteen says in a promotional trailer for Tracks II. "And really, I was working the whole time."

Later, he adds, "The Lost Albums are records that were full records, some of them even to the point of being mixed, and not released. For one reason or another, something I felt was missing from some of them, or they just didn't feel complete at the time."

Hardcore fans have known for years that Springsteen had a pretty full "vault," complete with at least a couple mostly-completed albums, but the revelation that there were seven -- some recorded with the E Street Band and some as recently as 2018 -- has been big news.

One persistent rumor has been that in the 1990s, Springsteen released a rap-inspired album that leaned heavily on drum machine. That's true, as it turns out, and the record will be released as part of Tracks II in the form of Streets of Philadelphia Sessions. Recorded in 1993, most of the songs never saw the light of day, although both "Streets of Philadelphia" and "The Secret Garden" came out of the sessions.

Today, Springsteen released the single "Blind Spot," and while it's more "Streets of Philadelphia" than "Down With the King," you can hear a clear hip-hop influence on the drum loop.

There are literally hundreds of unreleased or "early version" Springsteen songs out there, so what makes Tracks II such a milestone? It's the notion of releasing unreleased albums.

Springsteen is one of the last great album artists in pop music, and while some of the records would fit neatly into the category of a "concept album" -- particularly Nebraska, The Ghost of Tom Joad, and The Rising -- even the ones where that label does not fit as well are thematically bound together in a way that says something bigger about where the artist's head is at.

 Thom Zimny, a filmmaker who has made a number of documentaries about Springsteen's work, recently released Road Diary, a film that highlighted the importance of Springsteen's set list to the themes and storytelling he wanted to do on his recent tour. His observation about the set list certainly rings true when you apply it to albums like Born to Run, Darkness on the Edge of Town, or Magic:

"The set list that he was yelling to the band in the room was not just a list of songs, but was the details of a story -- a story he was trying to construct with them during the rehearsals -- a story of songs, and songs that cover decades," Zimny told me in October. "I knew that my gut reaction to that footage was the film gods pointing me in a direction of the importance of the set list -- the importance of Bruce, the storyteller -- and then looking at the songs and what they carry. There are themes of friendship, redemption, an understanding of your present day, the past, and your future."

While Springsteen's catalog has been shaped heavily by live records, best-of albums, singles, and other nooks and crannies where original songs can surface, he has officially only released 21 studio albums. That means Tracks II: The Lost Albums constitutes 25% of his total career output, in terms of his absolute number of studio releases. Unlike Tracks (or Greatest Hits or The Essential Bruce Springsteen, both of which also debuted new songs), Tracks II is being positioned specifically as a series of albums, and each is going to have to be examined and evaluated on its own terms and in the greater context of what was going on in the world, and with Bruce Springsteen personally.

That means that, more than any single "drop" in Springsteen's career, Tracks II has the potential to fundamentally reshape Springsteen's legacy. Streets of Philadelphia Sessions and its long-rumored hip-hop influences are evidence that Bruce, typically considered "dad rock" and occasionally dipping his toes into folk and country rock, has periodically experimented in other genres. If an entire album emerges from Tracks II that shows Bruce operating out of his comfort zone, it could reshape the way people think about him in the same way the sparse, haunting songs of Nebraska did in 1983 -- the year in which the first of the Lost Albums was also recorded.

Tracks II: The Lost Albums by Bruce Springsteen is coming to CD, vinyl, and digital on June 27th. Lost And Found: Selections from The Lost Albums — will feature 20 highlights from across the collection, and will drop on the same day.