Tracks II: The Lost Albums

Album ∙ Rock ∙ 2025

Bruce Springsteen

History gets harder and harder to make, but never in the long, weird history of popular music has there been an analogue for this. Doorstop box sets with troves of fan-coveted rarities are de rigueur for any legacy artist, very much including Bruce Springsteen, whose 1998 compilation Tracks dutifully assembled 66 of these—four and a half hours of alternate history to one of rock’s most vaunted narratives. Twenty-seven years later, its nominal sequel is composed of seven full and distinct stand-alone albums recorded between 1983 and 2018, largely unknown to even the most devout Springsteen cryptographers. That something so auspicious and audacious bears the modest title Tracks II is the slyest joke of his career.

Individually, these albums demonstrate both logical extensions of his classic songwriting that manage to meet that impossible standard, as well as tantalizing, disciplined, and fully realized genre exercises that have no real precedent in his discography. As a whole, the collection begs nothing less than a wholesale reevaluation of an already deeply considered career.

A collection of gussied-up home recordings that bridges the gap between 1982’s Nebraska and the 1984 supernova Born in the U.S.A.. An entire album in the subdued synth-pop vein of “Streets of Philadelphia” and “Secret Garden.” (The long-held idea that the ’90s was a relatively fallow period for Springsteen, for example, goes very much out the window.) An atmospheric soundtrack to a shelved western that answers the question, “What if Springsteen transformed himself into Tom Waits?” One pure honky-tonk album and one of untied-bow-tie jazz-standards style torch songs. An album influenced by Mexican music, another of full-bore, more recent vintage-rock songs. They’re all real.