Graham Reid is an NZ journalist, author, broadcaster and arts educator. His website, Elsewhere, provides features and reports on music, film, travel and other cultural issues.
The new collection of dozens of unreleased Bruce Springsteen songs from across his career explained in five tracks.
In 1998, Bruce Springsteen released Tracks, a box set of 66 songs, many of them previously unreleased, others interesting demos or rare B-sides. Now comes Tracks II: The Lost Albums, an even more expansive collection of 83 songs (74 previously unheard) from albums he completed between 1983 and 2018, but never released.
Tracks II offers something like an alternative history,so we highlight five songs from the different periods collected chronologically on the seven CD/seven album box set, also available digitally.
1.Fugitive’s Dream
from the LA Garage Sessions ’83
The 18 demos recorded between Nebraska and Born in the USA find Springsteen exploring Buddy Holly/Everly Brothers rockabilly (Little Girl Like You, Seven Tears), country (Jim Deer, County Fair) and different versions of the autobiographically reflective My Hometown and the Viet-vet narrative Shut Out the Light.
This eerie piece has a man confronted by an unstated secret from his past that eats away at him. He flees his wife and family, haunted by something unexplained and perhaps inexplicable. There are two versions, this is the first.
2.Maybe I Don’t Know You
from the Streets of Philadelphia Sessions album, 1993-94
Writing Streets of Philadelphia , the title song for the Jonathan Demme film Philadelphia, Springsteen experimented with synthesisers and loops to create the spectral sadness of that extraordinarily moving song, and then others. However, the album was sidelined and only one song slipped out, Secret Garden.
A pity because it contained excellent songs, notably this, where a man sees his partner with new clothes, a different hairstyle and listening to different music. He suspects … Springsteen weighs the vocal with increasing defeat. The newly separated Elvis who sang You Were Always On My Mind would have understood this.
3.Repo Man
from Somewhere North of Nashville, 1995
Those wanting Springsteen as a country singer rocking up the bar or getting melancholy with pedal steel have a whole album of that in Somewhere North of Nashville, recorded at the same time as the downbeat Ghost of Tom Joad.
Detail Man and Stand On It are among the rockers; Tiger Rose, You’re Gonna Miss Me When I’m Gone and Under a Big Sky are the weepers. Repo Man is Chuck Berry taken to the honky-tonk, with sharp pedal steel and a bar-room-rattling piano part. Not a classic but everyone’s having a good time. You will, too.
4.Ciudad Juarez
from the album Inyo, 1995-1997
The songs on the excellent, unreleased Inyo album have Springsteen south of the border in a reflective, Hispanic frame of mind (Our Lady of Monroe, El Jardinero, One False Move). He goes a bit Roy Orbison on The Lost Charro.
Ciudad Juarez is an acoustic ballad with lonely trumpet about a father travelling to Juarez and losing his daughter to the drug trade. Anyone who got immersed in the Netflix series Narcos Mexico will be on familiar if uncomfortable territory.
5.Two of Us
from the album Twilight Hours, recordings between 2010 and 2018
Springsteen’s 2019 orchestrated Western Stars album was an ambitious marriage of songwriting with widescreen Western soundtracks. The songs on Twilight Hours come from the same period and sensibility, where Burt Bacharach-like arrangements (Sunday Love, Follow the Sun), Orbison’s emotional depth (the immediately affecting September Kisses) and The Boss’s storytelling find common ground on ballads. Two of Us (not the only title on Tracks II previously claimed) pulls together those threads on a song that sounds instantly familiar and soars from “I walk with my head down”, when love and the strings give him uplift.
