Undercover Boss: my verdict on Bruce Springsteen’s lost albums

Since 1983, Bruce Springsteen has recorded 74 songs that have never been heard. Until now.

American singer-songwriter Bruce Springsteen, whose 21st album 'Only The Strong Survive: Covers Vol 1' was released in November 2022. Picture: supplied

It is hard to believe but from 1983 to 2018 Bruce Springsteen wrote, recorded, completed and decided not to release a remarkable seven albums. These are not the usual rag-tag collections sold as buried treasure, usually after an artist’s death, which turn out to be nothing more than a bunch of demos never intended for public consumption in the first place. These are actual albums, shaped by a sound and a theme, which for one reason or another Springsteen decided to hold back, lock away in a cupboard and forget all about – until now. Back in 1998, Springsteen did release Tracks, a four-CD box set of mostly unreleased songs, but that featured a lot of material already out there. Out of the 83 songs on Tracks II: The Lost Albums, however, 74 are previously unheard. Time to dig in.

LA Garage Sessions, 1983

Unsure whether to continue in the moody, low-key vein of Nebraska (1982) or release Born in the USA and become the air-punching, denim-clad Eighties rock colossus of legend, Springsteen put together this collection of folky character studies in a garage at his home in the Hollywood Hills. Crime and punishment feature heavily: Jim Deer concerns a former robber reflecting on his lot in prison, Richfield Whistle has the same character struggling to rehabilitate himself once he’s out and Fugitive’s Dream is about a man whose stable life is derailed by the return of a sinister figure from his misspent youth.

Springsteen has written frequently about people who cannot escape their past, mirroring his own attempt to silence inner demons through constant work, and they are all over this bleak, sparse, affecting album. Some of the songs did pop up elsewhere in altered forms, such as Born in the USA’s My Hometown and the 1984 B-side Johnny Bye-Bye, a Chuck Berry song rewritten as a reflection on the death of Elvis Presley. For the most part, though, this is a tantalising vision of how Springsteen’s life and career could have turned out very differently indeed.
TOP TRACK: The Klansman

Bruce Springsteen performs at the San Siro Stadium in Milan on July 3. Picture: AP

Streets of Philadelphia Sessions, 1993-94

In 1994 Streets of Philadelphia, written for Jonathan Demme’s AIDS movie Philadelphia, went to No.2, giving Springsteen his biggest UK chart hit and reviving his career in the process. He considered releasing an entire album of electronic recordings in the same vein, played out on drum loops and synthesisers, which he had been experimenting with at his new home in Bel-Air, Los Angeles. And he gave free rein to his darkest thoughts in the process.

Maybe I Don’t Know You is an ominous tale of paranoia, with the unfamiliar sight of a lover’s dress sending the narrator down a spiral of jealousy. Blind Spot puts a funky drummer loop and a sampled shout against an oppressive tale of lovers inhabiting each other “like it was some kind of disease” and the self-explanatory Waiting on the End of the World comes with an ominous siren call.

This is deep, revelatory material, a product of inner torment and musical curiosity. That might be why Springsteen held it back, got the old E Street Band back together and put out a greatest hits album instead.
TOP TRACK: Maybe I Don’t Know You

Somewhere North of Nashville, 1995

While he was busy returning to socially conscious roots with the sombre 1995 album The Ghost of Tom Joad, Springsteen intended to lighten the mood of that folky collection with a second disc of rockabilly and country songs. So he gathered up an ace session crew, including the pedal steel player Marty Rifkin and the violinist Soozie Tyrell, and cut the whole thing live at his Thrill Hill Beverly Hills home studio.

Repo Man, a portrait of the guy who comes to take your car away when you don’t keep up the monthly payments, found Springsteen at his most carefree, while Detail Man and Delivery Man are essentially same tune, different men. Under a Big Sky is a classic heartbreak song in the clean-cut Nashville tradition, and the fun Janey Don’t You Lose Heart popped up as a Born in the USA-era B-side.

It all sounds like the kind of thing you’d want to hear in a honky-tonk on the edge of town: loose, cheerful, not entirely serious.
TOP TRACK: Detail Man

Inyo, 1996

Inspired by Across the Borderline, Ry Cooder’s theme to Tony Richardson’s 1982 human smuggling saga The Border, Springsteen recorded an album’s worth of tales from the Mexican diaspora, historical, social and magical realist.

The Lost Charro tells of a proud former cowboy who finds himself picking fruit in the States, Our Lady of Monroe features a retiring police detective who makes a pilgrimage to a town where the Madonna has been spotted, and Ciudad Juarez depicts drugs and gun smuggling over the Rio Grande.

Essentially, Springsteen captured the immigrant experience: the dream of going to a place where the streets are paved with gold, only to discover that you might lose more than you’ll ever gain. With mariachi brass augmenting a rich tapestry of guitars, keyboards and violins, it must be the most elegant album Springsteen never released.

TOP TRACK: When I Build My Beautiful House

Perfect World, 1990s-2000s

The only album in the collection not originally intended as a standalone release, here Springsteen had put together various unused rock songs, chiefly as a way of balancing out the folky introspection dominating elsewhere. That’s why it doesn’t hang together with the same purpose and cohesion as the others. Still, there are plenty of built-for-stadium belters to enjoy, all of them ready to be revived for the next E Street Band world tour. Rain in the River is the kind of rousing belter Wrecking Ball (2012) is filled with, while You Lifted Me Up is a spiritually inclined singalong with backing vocals from Springsteen’s wife, Patti Scialfa, and the E Street Band’s Steven Van Zandt. The title track, meanwhile, imagines a place where “every stray dog would find his way”.

This has more in common with the feelgood vibes of Springsteen’s concerts than the dark moments captured on so many of his quieter albums.
TOP TRACK: Rain in the River

Faithless, 2005

Written for a film that was never made – a “spiritual western”, according to Springsteen – Faithless features a rare thing for a man who has dedicated his life to crafting the perfect song: instrumental music. Heavenly choirs, twanging guitars and even a celeste contribute to evoke the dusty, desolate beauty of the desert, where we can only assume the abandoned film was set.

There are some great songs too, such as Where You Going Where You From, featuring Springsteen’s young children Evan and Sam on backing vocals, and Let Me Ride, a close gospel relation to the live favourite Land of Hope and Dreams.

Almost nothing is known about the film that never even got to the shooting stage but Where You Going has a line about crossbows and Hawken guns, and Goin’ to California conjures images of saloons, whiskey bottles and twirling senoritas, so we can only imagine this was an abandoned Martin Scorsese project about frontiers people wrestling with God and the Devil. Funnily enough, Springsteen wrote such weighty material on a jolly horse-riding trip with his equestrian daughter in Florida.
TOP TRACK: Let Me Ride

Twilight Hours, 2010

Leaving the countryside for the city, ditching his plaid shirt for a tuxedo, the Boss headed to the middle of the road for an elegant collection of songs about love lost, regrets made and lives lived. Writing music with the chordal complexity of Burt Bacharach, singing with the purity of Frank Sinatra, Springsteen set himself the challenge of leaving behind familiar styles for orchestrally enhanced songs on the lonely side of romance.

“She’s gone and I carry on,” he mourns on Late in the Evening, while Lonely Town could have come straight from a Broadway musical. Springsteen intended Twilight Hours as a companion piece to the 2019 “countrypolitan” album Western Stars but he decided at the last minute to hold it back – an odd choice given this is such a fully realised exercise in songwriting classicism. From the falsetto climax of Sunliner, to the lonely harmonica opening Dinner at Eight, to the small-town love story turned crime drama in High Sierra – another song about a man who cannot outrun his past – Twilight Hours is the most unSpringsteen-like album that Springsteen has made.
TOP TRACK: High Sierra

Tracks II: The Lost Albums, by Bruce Springsteen (Columbia) is out now.