Bruce Springsteen isn’t ready to leave the vaults. He’s already talking about a follow-up just over a week before the arrival of Tracks II: The Lost Albums, a new seven-disc, 83-song box.
“Tracks III, that is finished,” Springsteen tells The New York Times. He said the next set will return to sessions dating from his 1973 debut, Greetings From Asbury Park, N.J., and include music recorded as recently as 2024.
“It’s basically what was left in the vault,” Springsteen added. “So there was a lot of good music left. There are five full albums of music.”
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Tracks, a four-disc box released in 1998, featured individual demos, alternate versions and unreleased songs from across his career to that point. Highlights included previously unheard material from 1975’s Born to Run, 1978’s Darkness on the Edge of Town and 1984’s Born in the U.S.A. The set concluded with an outtake from 1995’s The Ghost of Tom Joad.
Tracks II will be formatted differently, with Springsteen’s songs organized as seven distinct LPs. They kick off with LA Garage Sessions ’83, recorded soon after the arrival of Nebraska, and continue through the more recent Perfect World.
Listen to ‘Rain in the River’ from ‘Tracks II: The Lost Albums’
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The new projects are being completed with Ron Aniello, who’s been Springsteen’s producer and sideman since 2010. They remix the original recordings, while occasionally adding an instrumental part. Aniello noted, however, that Springsteen “didn’t re-sing anything. All those records have those vocals from that era, whenever it was,” he told The Times.
Springsteen’s most recent album of original material is 2020’s Letter to You, which was followed by 2022’s soul covers album, Only the Strong Survive. More recently, he issued a four-track EP, Land of Hope and Dreams, with live renditions of the title track, “Long Walk Home” from 2007’s Magic, “My City of Ruins” from 2002’s The Rising and a cover of Bob Dylan‘s “Chimes of Freedom.”
He hints that new music might be on the horizon. “I’m a better man when I’m working,” Springsteen said. “I feel like I’ve got plenty of work left in me, and our band does too. Our band’s in great shape, and we carry on.”
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Longtime fans will tell you his studio records are only half the story – concert performances are the other, and maybe more essential, part.
Gallery Credit: Michael Gallucci
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