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France 24
15 hours ago
- Entertainment
- France 24
Springsteen digs into the vault to rewrite his 'lost' '90s
It turns out "The Boss" never bought into that narrative, and now he's aiming to overturn it with a new collection of unreleased material, "Tracks II: The Lost Albums," released on Friday. "I often read about myself in the '90s as having some lost period," the 75-year-old rocker said in a 17-minute documentary released last week. "Actually, Patti and I were parenting very young children at the time, so that affected some of your workout," he conceded, referencing his wife and E Street Band member, Patti Scialfa. "But really, I was working the whole time." During the Covid pandemic, Springsteen returned to his archives and "finished everything I had in my vault." The result is a sprawling box set compilation of 83 songs organized thematically into seven albums, spanning his output from 1983 to 2018. But the greatest spotlight falls on the 1990s -- a decade long seen as a wilderness period for the New Jersey native, who was said to be struggling to find a solo identity during his hiatus from the E Street Band. Springsteen first burst onto the national scene in the '70s as a would-be heir to Bob Dylan, hit new commercial heights in the '80s with "Born in the USA," and delivered what many view as the definitive artistic response to the 9/11 attacks with "The Rising." One album in the box set revisits the "Streets of Philadelphia Sessions," evoking the namesake hit with a moody blend of synthesizers and pulsing drumbeats as he explores dark emotional terrain. "I'd made three albums about relationships, I had a fourth one," Springsteen said. "It was particularly dark, and I just didn't know if my audience was going to be able to hear it at that moment." Another record, "Somewhere North of Nashville," is a rollicking, country-rooted romp. A third, "Inyo," recorded in the late '90s along California's borderlands, is an ode to Mexican-American culture. Springsteen is far from the first major artist to unearth new material from songs that were originally shelved, following a tradition established by Dylan's "Bootleg Series" in 1991. "Tracks II," as the name suggests, is a sequel to 1998's "Tracks" -- and "Tracks III" is set to follow. Over the years, critics have often argued there's a reason some tracks remain unreleased -- with "new" Beatles songs based on the late John Lennon's homemade demos often cited as proof that not every vault needs to be reopened. So far, however, "Tracks II" has been received favorably by many reviewers. "For any fan, it's a revelation to hear the secret mischief that Bruce Springsteen was making in the shadows, during his most low-profile era -- the music he made for himself, after years of making music for the world," wrote Rob Sheffield in Rolling Stone. © 2025 AFP
New Straits Times
15 hours ago
- Entertainment
- New Straits Times
#Showbiz: Springsteen digs into the vault to rewrite his 'lost' '90s
WASHINGTON: Conventional wisdom among Bruce Springsteen fans holds that the 1990s were his "lost" decade – a period where he struggled to chart a new course after parting ways with his longtime collaborators, the E Street Band. It turns out "The Boss" never bought into that narrative, and now he's aiming to overturn it with a new collection of unreleased material, Tracks II: The Lost Albums, released on Friday. "I often read about myself in the '90s as having some lost period," the 75-year-old rocker said in a 17-minute documentary released last week. "Actually, Patti and I were parenting very young children at the time, so that affected some of your workout," he conceded, referencing his wife and E Street Band member, Patti Scialfa. "But really, I was working the whole time." During the Covid pandemic, Springsteen returned to his archives and "finished everything I had in my vault." The result is a sprawling box set compilation of 83 songs organised thematically into seven albums, spanning his output from 1983 to 2018. But the greatest spotlight falls on the 1990s – a decade long seen as a wilderness period for the New Jersey native, who was said to be struggling to find a solo identity during his hiatus from the E Street Band. Springsteen first burst onto the national scene in the '70s as a would-be heir to Bob Dylan, hit new commercial heights in the '80s with Born in the USA, and delivered what many view as the definitive artistic response to the 9/11 attacks with The Rising. One album in the box set revisits the Streets of Philadelphia Sessions, evoking the namesake hit with a moody blend of synthesisers and pulsing drumbeats as he explores dark emotional terrain. "I'd made three albums about relationships, I had a fourth one," Springsteen said. "It was particularly dark, and I just didn't know if my audience was going to be able to hear it at that moment." Another record, Somewhere North of Nashville, is a rollicking, country-rooted romp. A third, Inyo, recorded in the late '90s along California's borderlands, is an ode to Mexican-American culture. Springsteen is far from the first major artist to unearth new material from songs that were originally shelved, following a tradition established by Dylan's Bootleg Series in 1991. Tracks II, as the name suggests, is a sequel to 1998's Tracks – and Tracks III is set to follow. Over the years, critics have often argued there's a reason some tracks remain unreleased – with "new" Beatles songs based on the late John Lennon's homemade demos often cited as proof that not every vault needs to be reopened. So far, however, Tracks II has been received favourably by many reviewers. "For any fan, it's a revelation to hear the secret mischief that Bruce Springsteen was making in the shadows, during his most low-profile era – the music he made for himself, after years of making music for the world," wrote Rob Sheffield in Rolling Stone.
Toronto Sun
20 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Toronto Sun
On Springsteen's ‘Tracks II,' a trove of worthy castoffs
Published Jun 27, 2025 • 6 minute read Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band perform on, Nov. 19, 2024 in Edmonton. Photo by Greg Southam / Postmedia Network Reviews and recommendations are unbiased and products are independently selected. Postmedia may earn an affiliate commission from purchases made through links on this page. This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below. THIS CONTENT IS RESERVED FOR SUBSCRIBERS ONLY Subscribe now to read the latest news in your city and across Canada. Unlimited online access to articles from across Canada with one account. Get exclusive access to the Toronto Sun ePaper, an electronic replica of the print edition that you can share, download and comment on. Enjoy insights and behind-the-scenes analysis from our award-winning journalists. Support local journalists and the next generation of journalists. Daily puzzles including the New York Times Crossword. SUBSCRIBE TO UNLOCK MORE ARTICLES Subscribe now to read the latest news in your city and across Canada. Unlimited online access to articles from across Canada with one account. Get exclusive access to the Toronto Sun ePaper, an electronic replica of the print edition that you can share, download and comment on. Enjoy insights and behind-the-scenes analysis from our award-winning journalists. Support local journalists and the next generation of journalists. Daily puzzles including the New York Times Crossword. REGISTER / SIGN IN TO UNLOCK MORE ARTICLES Create an account or sign in to continue with your reading experience. Access articles from across Canada with one account. Share your thoughts and join the conversation in the comments. Enjoy additional articles per month. Get email updates from your favourite authors. THIS ARTICLE IS FREE TO READ REGISTER TO UNLOCK. Create an account or sign in to continue with your reading experience. Access articles from across Canada with one account Share your thoughts and join the conversation in the comments Enjoy additional articles per month Get email updates from your favourite authors Don't have an account? Create Account A long time ago, in a century far, far away, Bruce Springsteen released two discrete albums of new music at the same time. 'Human Touch' was the one he had sweated over and second-guessed across three calendar years, 'Lucky Town' the one he had knocked out in a couple of months thereafter. These were the first records he had released since informing the E Street Band in 1989 that their services were no longer required. Springsteen's new box set, 'Tracks II: The Lost Albums,' marks the simultaneous unveiling of not two or three but seven complete records made between 1983 and 2018. That's the swath of temporal real estate in which the Boss became an MTV star; suffered a crisis of confidence and reemerged as a sombre, goateed balladeer; then – in the wake of 9/11 and the reassembly and expansion of the E Street Band – matured into a beloved elder statesman and international goodwill ambassador. This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below. These long-shelved records transcend eras, genres and sartorial regrets. They also reveal that what looked like distinct, easily sorted phases in the latter half of Springsteen's 60-year career were in fact illusions based on whichever creative identity the Once and Future Boss felt like foregrounding at the time. An example: When he recorded 1995's downbeat set of border tales 'The Ghost of Tom Joad,' and then set out on a long tour in support of that powerful but almost willfully uncommercial album, the knee-sliding, amp-blowing Boss of lore didn't go into a coma. We now know this because 'Somewhere North of Nashville,' one of the previously unknown albums included in this treasure trove, was recorded concurrently featuring the same players. And it's a barn-burner, more country-fried and twangy than his albums with the E Street Band, but still the kind of boisterous, upbeat music that the rowdy fans who couldn't abide his nightly requests for quiet on the folkie, solo acoustic 'Joad' tour might've welcomed. Your noon-hour look at what's happening in Toronto and beyond. By signing up you consent to receive the above newsletter from Postmedia Network Inc. Please try again This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below. 'The L.A. Garage Sessions '83' is the outlier. Its 18 tracks are a decade older than any of the other music here. Die-hards will probably know them – from their infrequent live performances, from 'Born in the U.S.A.'-era B-sides (later compiled on the first 'Tracks' set) or from long-circulating bootlegs. They capture a self-described 'gun shy of fame' Springsteen continuing to experiment with home recording on the opposite coast after 'Nebraska,' a record for which he famously chose to release his four-track solo cassette demos instead of the subsequent full-band studio takes, which he found lacking in magic. Empowered, as longtime Springsteen historian Erik Flannigan explains in his liner notes, by the discovery that he could explore new paths without dragging his band into a studio for two years, Springsteen continued working in that vein. While bits of lyrics from these often ghostly, reverb-heavy tracks found their way onto more familiar releases later, only 'My Hometown,' included here in a version on which Springsteen sounds more hoarse than usual, made it onto 'Born in the U.S.A.' the next year. This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below. It's puzzling that Springsteen has opted at last to share these era-bridging recordings this way, instead of on a past-due 40th-anniversary edition of 'U.S.A.' A jumbo-size reissue of the Boss's best-selling album – the one that turned him, for better and worse, into a mainstream celebrity – would've felt like a given after the tricked-out deluxe versions of 'Born to Run,' 'Darkness on the Edge of Town' and 'The River' he put out circa 2005-2015. Anyway, after the '83 stuff, we still have more than four hours of music that even former Backstreets magazine subscribers (RIP, Backstreets) have never heard in any form. Want wintry mid-Atlantic depressive Bruce? I give you 'The Streets of Philadelphia Sessions,' an introspective set recorded in the same percussion-loop-based style that begot his Oscar-winning song for Jonathan Demme's film 'Philadelphia.' Fans for whom decades of rumours about a shelved Springsteen hip-hop record conjured images of, say, Warren Beatty rapping in the bizarro 1998 satire 'Bulworth' can relax. You prefer redemption-seeking searcher Bruce? 'Faithless,' compiling songs and instrumentals he was commissioned to compose 20 years ago for an unnamed 'spiritual Western,' is meditative and haunting, tender and rapturous. The film this music was written for remains unmade, but the movie it inspires in the listener's mind could've been directed by Jane Campion or John Ford. This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below. How about mariachi Bruce? (I'm sorry, it sounded like you said mariachi Bruce.) He's here, too, on 'Inyo,' which returns to the Texas and California border settings of 'Tom Joad' but accompanies its tales of striving migrants, conflicted cops and vanished loves with brighter and more varied instrumentation. It revives Springsteen's penchant for stealing movie titles with 'One False Move,' inspired by Carl Franklin's superb 1992 Bill Paxton-starring southern noir. No skips. A more surprising success than mariachi Bruce is easy-listening Bruce. 'Twilight Hours,' his experiment in Bacharach/David-style balladry, is at least as good a showcase for his age-70-plus singing as 'Only the Strong Survive,' the weirdly sterile 2022 set of soul and R & B covers that set out to emphasize his September-of-my-years vocals. Hey, Sinatra was from New Jersey, too. Like 'Somewhere North of Nashville,' 'Twilight Hours' was recorded in tandem with a more familiar album, the equally confident 'Western Stars.' Evidently Springsteen thought the cowboy hat fit him better than the fedora. This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below. None of this material is embarrassing, and much of it is inspired. At 83 tracks and 5⅓ hours, 'Tracks II' is an investment, a commitment and an odyssey. It's 20-track sampler version, 'Lost and Found,' seems pointless in the streaming era. This new menagerie is a gift not least because of what it says about Springsteen's obsessive self-curation. 'I've always released my records with great care,' he writes in the set's introduction, 'making sure my narratives built upon one another.' Finishing these up for release was a pandemic project for the workaholic Springsteen. But he's been operating in legacy mode for more than a decade now, uncorking a still-flowing river of archival live releases, the memoir 'Born to Run,' its stage adaptation 'Springsteen on Broadway,' several documentaries, a podcast with President Barack Obama (!) and, most frightening of all, the upcoming feature film 'Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere,' starring Jeremy Allen White as 'Nebraska'-era Bruuuuuuuce. This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below. While the first 'Tracks,' released a generation ago in 1998, included material from before Springsteen assembled the E Street Band and from after he dismissed it, the collection was still a band-forward affair. Nearly every member of the present-day E Street Band plays on 'Tracks II' in some capacity, but they don't feel present as a collective. Five of these seven albums are conspicuously LP-sized, as in 40 minutes long or less. 'Garage Sessions' and 'Twilight Hours' are each spread over four sides of wax – if you're willing to part with Something North of Three Hundred Dollars to hear them in that format. 'The joy of these records to me now are their imperfections,' Springsteen reflects in his introduction. Certainly I can think of a dozen songs from his 'regular' albums I would rate below anything in these lost ones – and not just most of 'Human Touch.' These albums may have been imperfect for their times, but for these times, they're close enough to perfect. Read More Love concerts, but can't make it to the venue? Stream live shows and events from your couch with VEEPS, a music-first streaming service now operating in Canada. Click here for an introductory offer of 30% off. Explore upcoming concerts and the extensive archive of past performances. Toronto Raptors News Music Toronto Raptors Canada
Forbes
a day ago
- Entertainment
- Forbes
Bruce Springsteen Massive New Album Easily Rises Into The Top 10
Bruce Springsteen's Tracks II: The Lost Albums debuts at No. 9 on the iTunes Top Albums chart, ... More featuring seven unreleased albums recorded throughout decades. ALBANY, NEW YORK - APRIL 15: Bruce Springsteen performs with The E Street Band at MVP Arena on April 15, 2024 in Albany, New York. (Photo by) On Friday (June 27), Bruce Springsteen released what may be his largest project ever. The rock superstar delivered Tracks II: The Lost Albums, a box set featuring seven complete albums that the singer-songwriter wrote and recorded throughout the decades but never shared with the public. Springsteen has been teasing the massive project for months with multiple song drops, many of which have become successes on iTunes. As the complete compilation arrives, it has already become a bestseller, and it may enjoy a lofty opening on the Billboard charts in a few days. Bruce Springsteen's New Top 10 Album Tracks II easily breaks into the top 10 on the iTunes Top Albums chart in the U.S., which lists the bestselling full-lengths and EPs on what is usually regarded as one of the most important sales platforms in the country. The box set currently appears at No. 9 as of the time of publishing, but it could continue to climb in the coming hours and days. Bruce Springsteen Follows Lorde Tracks II earns one of a trio of new arrivals inside the iTunes Top Albums chart's top 10. Virgin, the latest full-length by New Zealand superstar Lorde, beats Springsteen by two spaces as it settles at No. 7. Girl group Katseye launches its Beautiful Chaos EP at No. 10. Bruce Springsteen's Multiple New Bestselling Tunes Springsteen also fills half a dozen spots on the iTunes Top Songs ranking, although none of his tunes have become massive bestsellers this Friday. 'Blind Spot,' 'Sunday Love,' 'Faithless,' 'Sripo Man,' 'Rain in the River,' and 'Adelita' all appear between Nos. 150 and 184. The focus of Tracks II is not necessarily to produce a huge hit but rather for Springsteen to share the wealth of music he has created throughout the years with a fan base that is constantly ravenous for new material.
The Guardian
a day ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
‘I hate the arrangements!' Two Bruce superfans dissect Springsteen's lavish lost albums box set
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. Sign up to Sleeve Notes Get music news, bold reviews and unexpected extras. Every genre, every era, every week after newsletter promotion 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
