‘I hate the arrangements!' Two Bruce superfans dissect Springsteen's lavish lost albums box set

The Guardian

a day ago

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.
Laura Barton I think you're spot on about this, and particularly about what The Lost Albums are. But it's interesting that even in the early 80s, shortly before these recordings began, he stepped away from being the Boss – releasing Nebraska rather than Born in the USA. I'm never quite sure whether that was through confidence or compulsion or a kind of necessity. Whatever it was, I think it established a tension between these two Bruces that has proved fruitful. I should probably add that maybe that tension began with songs like Stolen Car and The River in 1980, but that's for another conversation, and probably he addresses it himself in 1987 on Tunnel of Love's Two Faces …
MH Where do you hear the closest to your platonic ideal of Bruce within this set?
LB In the first two tracks from the Streets of Philadelphia Sessions, made around 1993 – Blind Spot and Maybe I Don't Know You. They have all that encroaching darkness that marks my favourite Bruce songs. You?
MH I thought it would be on LA Garage Sessions '83. They really did just sound like band demos. What surprised me and tickled me the most was Twilight Hours, the Bacharach-style album, where there were plenty of other musicians. He wrote this in tandem with 2019's Western Stars, and while I wasn't mad about Western Stars, I thought the Twilight Hours songs found something very reflective of age in them, and also take Bruce back to an American bar tradition, albeit a different kind of bar to The Stone Pony.
LB I laughed out loud when Twilight Hours opened, in a warm and surprised way. I love that tradition of American songwriting – and performance. It's Bacharach, but there's a lot of the longing of Jimmy Webb or Glen Campbell to the material. But his voice here is fascinating to me, because I'm guessing for a lot of singers there comes a point where they wonder which way to go, and an awful lot of well-known artists pursue the classics and mine the American songbook and take on that sort of fireside persona, and it's interesting that Bruce could have taken that path.
MH That's interesting, because I don't hear these songs that way. Darkness on the Edge of Town, from 1978, is my favourite Springsteen album, and this seems – in a very peculiar way – a companion to that. It sounds like the record the parents of the characters in Darkness might have been listening to, addressing their concerns.
LB That's a good way to put it, but I'm not saying it sounds like a fireside album. I'm saying that the croon of his voice opens that avenue, and it's not one I ever considered for Bruce.
MH You're right about the croon. I think his voice sounds better on Twilight Hours than it does on rock songs now. It's nice not hearing the effort. But I want to bring you back to the Streets of Philadelphia Sessions. I love the songs there, but hate the arrangements. Well not even the arrangements. The drum loops, inspired in part by the era's west coast hip-hop. It dates it all so badly. I keep expecting manager Jon Landau to shout: 'Hear the drummer get wicked!' We both have bits of the Bruce catalogue we don't much like the sound of. But this?
LB I love those loops and will defend them to the death.
MH You OK, hun? You've hardly touched your Little Steven bandana print toilet paper.
LB When I heard they would be included I feared they would sound dated, but unexpectedly I just don't think they do. There's something very stark and sombre about the way they're used. I'm listening to Streets of Philadelphia's Blind Spot and there's a yelp in there that is very different to the howl of say, I'm on Fire or Atlantic City, but there's something animalistic about it that hits a similar spot for me. Some of my favourite Bruce moments across his career are those beyond-words utterances.
MH I quite like the fact this is, in the main, a bunch of genre exercises. I usually think his genre pastiches are the weakest thing in his repertoire – top o' the mornin' to you Irish-American folk-punk – but putting these collections out in this way enables me to hear them not as 'the album after Tom Joad' or whatever, but as discrete little packages.
LB Oh that's interesting, because I now don't see them as discrete little packages so much as ongoing conversations with his own music.
MH I know that's what they are for him. Because he's been having that conversation with these songs over years, whereas for me they're brand new information. It's like hearing an old friend say: 'Did I ever tell you about the time I got married and divorced in a weekend in Ulaanbaatar?'
LB Do you think that will change with repeated listening? Because the way I've been listening to them over the past few weeks has been mixed in with the rest of his repertoire. Sort of stitching them back into the fabric of what I already know and love.
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MH Yes, I think they will – as lots of the songs from the first Tracks collection, or from the Darkness and River boxes have. I'm fascinated by the way a generation of older musicians – Bruce, Neil Young, Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell – have been emptying their vaults. I can't imagine it's solely about raking in those sweet geriatric bucks. I wonder if they all, in their ways, want to forestall all the questioning about, well, everything. It's as if they're saying: Here it all is, everything that has passed through my musical mind; you decide for yourself.
LB My suspicion is that it's something to do with the freedom and sure-footedness you can find the older you get. That it's something about not being afraid to be seen. So in the same way that Bruce wrote the autobiography and the Broadway show, and some of that exposed elements of his life and career that a younger Bruce might have wanted to keep hidden – to me this feels like an extension of that. And maybe there's a connection to the opening of the new Springsteen Archives/Center for American Music next year: a gift to our understanding of a body of work. It's acknowledging that there's illumination in showing your working.
MH There's something he's said in interviews that interests me, when he has said his audience 'wasn't ready' for these albums. Which suggests a certain insecurity he has since overcome. Because, in truth, only the obsessional are going to be delving deep into this much music, and that's fine, and that would have been true then, as well. But at that time, without the E Street Band, he maybe felt he risked too much. So if he wasn't going to make rock music for the best part of a decade, he had best not throw out too much non-rock, so that the rockers were still there when he was ready to come back. I don't think there's any such insecurity now he plays to 75,000 people a night again in Europe.
LB Yes, possibly. Or maybe it wasn't insecurity, it was just Bruce's understanding of how much an audience can take. I'm always really interested in how he knows just how long to take any solo or musical diversion or 'jam' in a live show. It never feels indulgent to me. In a similar way, I think he has a profound understanding of what an audience can take in a broader sense, perhaps before they do. Also, side note, I think a lot of the audience not being 'ready' relates to my beloved Streets of Philadelphia Sessions, and Bruce thinking audiences weren't able to take a fourth album about curdled relationships after Tunnel of Love, Human Touch and Lucky Town.
MH Can we talk about the missing thing? Electric Nebraska. In a Rolling Stone piece, Springsteen first said no such thing existed. Then a week later he texted the writer to say: Oh, I had a poke and there is an Electric Nebraska, 'though it does not have the full album of songs'. Which strikes me as both coy and disingenuous. But that seems so much part of this story, and I can only guess that's being held back for a Nebraska reissue to go with the film. Is it churlish to be unhappy about something missing from several hours of unheard music?
LB Yes it is churlish! I'm teasing you. Let's discuss it!
MH You talked about this music being part of the ongoing conversation. In this case, it feels a little like your friend telling you: 'That thing you really want to know? I'll probably tell you. Yeah, but not now.'
LB To which I would say: 'That's fine, it's yours to tell or not tell.'
MH Which album do you think is weakest? For me, it's Faithless, recorded between 2005 and 2006 as a soundtrack to a movie that never got made. I think it's the weakest not because of any explicit shortcomings on its part, but more because its sonic character isn't as fully defined as the others: it sounds as though any one of those songs could have been on the other records, but few of those songs could have been on Faithless.
LB I actually like Faithless. Though at times it was one of the points in this collection that made me want to hear Bruce work with other, more unexpected collaborators. I'd love to hear a soundtrack that set Bruce's voice against, say, an Oliver Coates cello piece. I took a little longer to find my footing in Inyo. Which surprised me, because Inyo really came out of The Ghost of Tom Joad, which I love.
MH I love the splashes of colour on Inyo from the mariachi band. It's not quite the mariachi album that was billed, but there's a joy in those songs – amid the hard times of a lot of the lyrics – that, again, reminds me of the thing the E Street Band do of finding joy in the despair.
LB Yes, I think it took a while for me to see those splashes of colour, because for a while it all felt quite bleached-out. What did you think of Perfect World? Less an album, more a compilation of tracks from the mid-90 to early 2010s.
MH It's a ragbag, but I think he was right that the collection needed some rock, and while there's no Badlands on it, there are some songs I'd be very happy to hear in the live set. I guess what's amazing is that at this point it is possible for Springsteen to release all this unheard music and for it to contain music that's not just interesting, not just decent, but contains a worthwhile number of songs that genuinely bear comparison to anything from any point in his career. The Klansman, Shut Out the Light, High Sierra – those all seem like masterpieces to me. And, as with Tracks, there are some smaller numbers that are fantastic – Janey, Don't Lose Your Heart on both Tracks collections, and on this one The Great Depression is, I suspect, going to be my go-to semi-throwaway.
LB I was going to ask you if there is a song on this collection you think might grow to be one of your favourites? I know when I got Dylan's Biograph the version of I'll Keep It With Mine on there eventually became my favourite Dylan song of all time. I'm not sure whether I've yet found that overwhelming feeling about a song here yet, but I agree with you about The Klansman and High Sierra. And I could see my relationship with Maybe I Don't Know You becoming quite intense.
MH And there's Tracks III to come, touted as five more albums-worth of music stretching from his debut in 1973 to last year. Plus – I bet – Electric Nebraska. It feels like so much. I just hope we get to hear some of this music some time. Preferably standing next to each other.
Bruce Springsteen's Tracks II: The Lost Albums is released on Sony on 27 June