Bruce Springsteen announced the June 27 release of seven “lost albums” as part of a new boxed set called Tracks II.
“During the pandemic, what I did during that time is I finished everything I had in my vault,” Springsteen, 75, said in a teaser released on Thursday, April 3. “This is Tracks II. The ‘Lost Albums’ are records that were [full albums], even to the point that they were going to be mixed, and not released.”
Springsteen organized 83 songs in total into a sequel to his 1998 boxed set, Tracks, which gathered rare and unheard material from the earliest days of the E Street Band up through the 1990s. Tracks II features even more unreleased songs recorded between 1983 and 2018.
“For one reason or another, something I felt was missing from some of [the ‘Lost Albums’], or they just didn’t feel complete at the time,” he explained. “Over a period of time, I built a small collection of full albums that for one reason or another, never got put out.”
A Look Back at Bruce Springsteen’s Career Over Six Decades
The first disc, titled LA Garage Sessions ’83, selects 18 songs that were initially developed as part of the Born in the U.S.A. recording sessions. Springsteen originally had a much different conception for Born in the U.S.A., with early tracks sounding much more akin to 1982’s sparse Nebraska than the synthesizer pop sound that eventually made it onto the 1984 record.
Other collections featured in Tracks II include Faithless, gathering selections from an abandoned film project. Somewhere North of Nashville features a country music sound, while Inyo draws on Latin influences. Springsteen experimented with pop orchestration on Twilight Hours, whereas Perfect World is the only disc that wasn’t initially conceived as a single album.
Streets of Philadelphia Sessions comes from Springsteen’s recordings in the mid-1990s, after he’d dismissed the E Street Band and released two solo albums, Lucky Town and Human Touch, on the same day in March 1992. Fans have long suspected that Springsteen planned to infuse contemporary hip-hop into his music around this time, though the material was never officially released until now.
“I read about myself in the ’90s as having some ‘lost period’ or something. Not really. Really, I was working the whole time,” Springsteen said in a teaser for Tracks II.
Bruce Springsteen and Wife Patti ‘Didn’t Expose’ Kids to His Fame
Springsteen will present his seven ‘Lost Albums’ alongside a 100-page clothbound, hardcover book filled with rare and never-before-seen photographs from the past 40 years. Fans can either opt for the full nine-disc Tracks II set or go for a condensed 20-track companion album titled Lost and Found: Selections From the Lost Albums.
The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee and his E Street Band are scheduled to be back on the road this summer for a 16-date European tour that will see them performing in the U.K., France, Germany and beyond.
Springsteen’s wife and bandmate, Patti Scialfa, was missing on most of his North American tour dates in 2024 due to her diagnosis with multiple myeloma, a blood cancer, in 2018. At the October 2024 premiere of his documentary Road Diary: Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band, the singer-songwriter said Scialfa’s diagnosis taught him a lesson in mortality.
Bruce Springsteen Gushes Over Wife Patti Scialfa After Her Cancer Diagnosis
“Hey, you get up around our age, and those are the things you’re thinking about,” he admitted. “Patti and I have had to deal with her illness, and you’re worried about … it is a part of your life now, questions of mortality, and it just becomes a part of your life.”
Springsteen was also recently spotted spending time with Jeremy Allen White, as the Bear star will be playing the rocker in the upcoming biopic Deliver Me From Nowhere. The Pale Blue Eye director Scott Cooper’s biographical music drama chronicles Springsteen’s efforts in trying to redefine himself with the recording of 1982’s gritty album Nebraska.
