Tracks II: The Lost Albums – Bruce Springsteen ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ (out of 5)

Long before you reach the quite astonishing Twilight Hours—the sixth record in Bruce Springsteen’s Tracks II: The Lost Albums—a collection of seven thematically-organized records of previously unreleased songs recorded between 1983 and 2018—this universal thought will have been conjured:

Jesu, does this man ever sleep?

Serving as the follow-up to Springteen’s 1998 box set Tracks, Tracks II contains 83 songs, 74 of them unreleased. Alternately anthemic, romantic, sorrowful, haunted, hushed, passionate, dark, horny, blue-collar and suffused in MexiCali solidarity, it’s as expansive as a Broooooooooce! bellow in a packed stadium, and vastly revealing about the private Springsteen in the years between official albums.

Many an artist releases tracks from the vault—Neil Young, Prince—and every box set collects a CD or so of completely unknown music. But no other songwriter has released the equivalent of a career’s worth of unreleased, fully-recorded-mixed-produced albums.

At the beginning of the box-set era, I once received a 4-CD Crosby, Stills & Nash box. It only featured two Neil Young songs, to leave room for what seemed like two dozen unreleased alternate takes, mixes, rehearsals and other dregs from the cutting room floor. Previously, Led Zeppelin had released the “Crop Circles” box, with two unreleased tracks. Two. To paraphrase brutally, a journalist once asked Jimmy Page: Where are all the Druid Master riffs from the vault that you didn’t use? And Page effectively said, there were none. If something was good, it went into a song and we released it. If not, it was gone.

Think of “The Rover,” with its three riffs, not to mention the blistering solo. Now expand that thought to include all the inspired takes in Zep’s recorded oeuvre that didn’t make the cut, and that the world will never get to hear.

That’s the thing about the vault. It’s usually where you bury the dead.

As it turns out, Bruce buried some of the living.

All the Bruce archetypes are woven through these 83 tracks: dreams of the promised land turned nightmare; strangers from nowhere with nothing to lose but bad debts no honest man can pay, looming on the outskirts of town in Cadillacs; sleepless nights over lost girls named Janey. Sure. But amid all the operas for the turnpike, the Boss has been writing pointed, elaborate short stories for 40 years—fully realizing them and then stashing them away in the Emily Dickinson drawer.

Should they have stayed there? Here are the un-hidden results, album by album:

L.A. Garage Sessions ’83 and the closer, Perfect World, are the albums that will feel most familiar to fans, and the opener gets stronger two-thirds in. “Johnny Bye Bye” is a dark riff on the Chuck Berry song, about the doom that follows Elvis’s death. Epic ballad “Richfield Whistle” inverts the narrative of “Jim Deer,” with the protagonist either punking out or thinking better about the crime. “The Klansman” might have been a game changer—a “Born in the USA”-style chugger that makes no judgment on the evil that comes to town; it just glows there in its robes. In “One Love,” I thought I had the wrong song cued up, with its electro drums. It might’ve gotten him clubbed behind the Stone Pony by some in the fanbase, but had he released it, it might’ve been one of the dozen game-changers in the box. Highlight: “Unsatisfied Heart.”

Unsurprisingly elegiac with its keyboard washes and swells, Streets of Philadelphia Sessions features the startling mini horror story “Something in the Well,” the strong “Waiting on the End of the World” with its towering, strangled guitar coda, and the breathtaking “The Little Things.” The anthem “One Beautiful Morning” opens with the arresting “Her eyes were black with disease / There was no release / Her hands folded on the sheets / But there was no peace.” Highlight: “The Little Things.” A soundtrack to a film that never existed, Faithless is a western desert fever-dream, overtly Dylanesque and heavy on the GodDoom. Highlight: “Where You Going, Where You From.”

Somewhere North of Nashville hits like a classicist Broooooce slap after all those Santa Ana devil winds, confirming he fell hard for the Western sound somewhere before or after The Ghost of Tom Joad, but really going as far back as the game-changing Nebraska (1982). It allowed him to expand his mythology out of the New Jersey straitjacket into something widescreen with a Latinized romanticism while remaining bone-deeply American; it would have made a solid classicist rockin’ album. “Repo Man” ranks among his meanest, funniest lyrics: “Couldn’t tell you how many times I could’ve got killed or laid / You shouldn’t a bought it if you couldn’t a paid”; the title track, among his most curtly self-damning—“For the deal I made, the price was strong / I traded you for this song.” Highlight: “Somewhere North of Nashville.”

Inyo expands on the MexiCali revenge histories, Out-in-the-West-Texas-town-of-El-Paso short stories of loss. In the arresting “The Last Charro”, Bruce almost sounds drunk—in the best way—in the keening vocal refrain. “Ciudad Juarez” is almost too painful, while “The Aztec Dance” is one of the softest, most sensitive, near-apologetic vocals of his career, making his allegiances in Trumpland clear. “Past the Pizza Hut, past the mall rats, she says / ‘Ma, they call us ‘greasеr’, they call us ‘wetback’ / Herе in this land that once was ours’ / Teresa’s mother bobby pins her hair in a crown of flowers.” This is the inversion of Nebraska—good guys, not bad guys, and there is the realization of how many Latino characters and their lives figure in his songs. Dozens. Highlight: “Ciudad Juarez.”

And so Twilight Hours. It’s been said that John Lennon regretted that his guitar playing was overlooked; Bob Dylan, his melodies. The echo here is Springsteen’s hidden—what, resentment?—that his vocal range, in both notes and emotion, has been lost or drowned in the stadia echoes. Proof? Compare the vocals in “Rain in the River,” “The Aztec Dance” and “Dinner At Eight.” And on this album, from the sweeping strings and keyboards to the suit-and-tie sensitive masculinity, Springsteen poured an ocean of musical resources, craft, and sheer emotional energy into what will unfairly but understandably be heard as a Sinatra genre exercise. 

Instead, hear it as a showcase of his deadly serious romanticism. Listen as he nails the vocal of “Two of Us” with his non-crooner voice over and over. Not just a showcase of his range, musically and vocally, but also of his deadly seriousness. The falsetto croon of “Sunliner,” the passionate rush of “Dinner at Eight”—it’s… remarkably revealing. He extravagantly makes “Lonely Town” work as a mature man “Jungleland” obvious; and someone should cover “Another You”—it’s just remarkable. You can sense the anxiety that prevented Springsteen—a renowned control freak—from releasing a statement as vulnerable and classicist as Twilight Hours. A man singing his heart out in the shower, or dancing in the dark… Highlight: “Dinner At Eight.”

The finale Perfect World feels close to an official release—which is likely why it wasn’t one. “Another Thin Line” is a strong “another home game / another close loss / Baby, we’ll get by” lyric. The snarling “Rain in the River” and the heart-snagging title track feel familiarly bracing. Highlight: “Rain in the River.”

What’s long and hard on a rock critic? Seven albums… kidding. However, while there is a 20-song sampler, Bruce might have considered releasing them album by album as well, since only a completist is likely to need an entire box set (especially at $350). If we number them: albums 1, 4 and 7 are closest to his canon but would not necessarily have amplified it, especially chart-wise. Album 3 is a sketch with moments, album 2 was likely judged too vulnerable and revealing to have been released—but along with albums 5 and 6, probably should have been. Ultimately, here is a man who did and does what we all should: he took Dylan seriously. He is always busy being born.