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What if Bruce Springsteen had followed up his synth-and-drum-machine-driven 1994 hit “Streets of Philadelphia” with a whole album largely in that vein? What if he’d dropped an album of Great American Songbook-style ballads instead of 2017’s Western Stars? Springsteen’s just-released boxed set Tracks II: The Lost Albums is packed with seven albums’ worth of alternate realities and musical surprises, offering a reminder of just how much he’s capable of outside of his stadium-shaking work with the E Street Band.
More than one of the albums were likely shelved because Springsteen couldn’t figure out how to tour them. Springsteen would’ve likely used the same band from his just concluded 1992-93 tour for a Streets of Philadelphia Sessions outing, but whatever their flaws, Human Touch and Lucky Town were full of uptempo rock songs — the atmospheric newer material was blatantly unsuited to arenas. Twilight Hours, his Burt Bacharach-influenced ballads album, posed a similar issue: Was Springsteen really ready to put on a suit and croon with an orchestra?
The unearthed track “Waiting on the End of the World” was likely Springsteen’s first attempt at a song for the Philadelphia soundtrack. The lyrical similarities, including lines about “wasting away” are too obvious to ignore. Director Jonathan Demme originally asked for a rock anthem to help connect his story with heartland America — our best guess is that “Waiting on the End of the World” was an attempt to fulfill that assignment.
The boxed set’s mysterious Faithless album — written for a never-made “spiritual Western” movie — helps solve a mystery about 2012’s Wrecking Ball. In his book Born to Run, Springsteen writes that two Wrecking Ball tracks — “Shackled and Drawn” and “Rocky Ground” — came from “a gospel film project I’d been working on.” In 2016, he confirmed to Rolling Stone in 2016 that the latter song “was originally written for a film,” and that he was still “sitting on the rest” of the songs. Faithless is almost certainly the collection of songs in question.
The psychological crisis Springsteen went through circa 1983 — which will figure heavily in the upcoming biopic Deliver Me From Nowhere — is at the heart of the songs included in L.A. Garage Sessions ’83. “He literally had to think about his whole life before he could release ‘Born in the U.S.A.’ and accept his destiny of pop stardom,” Hiatt says. In the wake of 1982’s Nebraska, which tapped into some dark emotional currents from his childhood, Springsteen realized he had to take a deep look at himself before he could move on — you can hear that in the existential weight of songs from “Unsatisfied Heart” to “County Fair.”
Springsteen himself clearly changed his mind about his Nineties output in the process of working on the boxed set. “I often read about myself in the Nineties having some lost period or something,” he said, dismissively, in a recent promo video for the album. But Springsteen himself described the Nineties with those exact words in a 2009 Rolling Stone interview with David Fricke.
Springsteen’s use of a mariachi sounds on “The Lost Charro” is inadvertently well-timed to the current commercial boom for Mexican regional music artists like Peso Pluma. The lovely song, from the lost Inyo album, includes a full mariachi band and bears little resemblance to anything else in the Springsteen catalog.
The chronology of the albums can get tricky. Most of the songs on Inyo are from 1997-98, but at least a couple were actually recorded in the Western Stars/Twilight Hours sessions, circa 2012. The largely rockabilly album Somewhere North of Nashville is even more confusing — the bulk of it was recorded in 1995, but the title track is from the 2010s, while other tracks were written in the Born in the U.S.A. era and re-recorded in ’95.
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