Springsteen obsessives rejoice! The Boss has released seven lost albums, made between 1983 and 2018. Where to start? Let our Bruce scholars light you through the darkness …
Bruce Springsteen is opening his treasure trove: Tracks II: The Lost Albums features 83 previously unheard songs – unless of course you’re one of the close friends that Springsteen has apparently been playing them to “for years” – from unreleased albums made in the gaps between his storied catalogue, spanning 1983 to 2018. To make sense of this vast tranche of new material, we got “tramps” Michael Hann and Laura Barton to pull apart the risks, regrets and riches in this landmark box set.
Michael Hann I saw the trailer for Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere the other day, which shows the symbolic moment in which the young Bruce buys his first new car, a 305 V8. “It’s awfully fitting for a handsome devil rock star,” the salesman says, leaning through the window. “I do know who you are.” Springsteen looks up and says, wistfully. “Well, that makes one of us.” I think that captures what Tracks II: The Lost Albums are, with Springsteen making sense of himself in those years when the world had decided on a very clear idea of which Bruce Springsteen it wanted, thank you very much. My feeling is that now, he’s very clearly delineated the Boss from another, more nuanced version of Bruce Springsteen. The Boss tours with the E Street Band; Bruce Springsteen writes a memoir, performs a Broadway one-man show, makes left-field records following his muse. Now he’s maybe able to do what he wanted to do in the late 80s and through the 90s because he’s secure in being able to switch between those two ideas – and he does know “the Boss” is an idea that he created – and also secure that his audience trusts him enough not always to be the Boss.
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