Bruce Springsteen

The legendary songwriter dug deep into his vault of unreleased music and found lost albums he's finally releasing

- ANDY GREENE

WHEN THE PANDEMIC brought the live-music industry to a complete stop in 2020, Bruce Springsteen found himself at home with a lot of free time on his hands.

He decided to make good use of it by poring over his massive vault of unreleased music, pulling out seven complete records he shelved between 1983 and 2018, and packaging them together as Tracks II: The Lost Albums, which is out now and features an astounding 74 songs most hardcore fans have never heard.

"If you look at them as a group, they're sort of genres that I haven't dived into as of yet," Springsteen says via Zoom from his home in Wellington, Florida, noting that the albums touch on everything from Western swing to Burt Bacharach-inspired 60s pop. "They were all these sort of outliers, and what do you do with them? I don't know. So this is how we ended up solving the problem." A high percentage of these songs were recorded in the 90s, often seen as a lost period for Springsteen as he released only a single studio record, 1995's The Ghost of Tom Joad, between 1992 and 2002. "That was for a variety of reasons," says Springsteen, who is touring in Europe this summer. "Our children were very young at exactly that moment. And also I didn't have any interest, really, in working with the band. I felt just burned out on it at that particular place in time. But I was working on music all the time. I just wasn't releasing it." He expects Tracks III to come out in a few years.

The box set starts with L.A. Garage Sessions '83. Nobody knew you recorded an entire album between Nebraska and Born in the U.S.A..

I enjoyed the recording and the experience of Nebraska and thought I might continue in that vein with a small rhythm section, still very low-fi, and a new group of songs. At the time I wasn't sure where I was going with Born in the U.S.A.. I had half the record. And so, it was just a record that happened in between.