Inside Bruce Springsteen's Seven Lost Albums: Your Guide to 'Tracks II'
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I'm Brian Hyatt. This is Rolling Stone Music Now. I'm here with Andy Green, and we're here to talk about a mammoth new box set.

by none other than Bruce Springsteen. It's called Tracks 2, The Lost Albums. It's a group of seven albums of unreleased material, starting back in 83 and going all the way up to the 2000s. And this is the follow-up to the original Tracks, which was also an amazing box set. I feel like this box set has been getting great reviews, and I wonder if all the critics who were raving about it have also heard

Tracks 1. Yeah, that Tracks 1 was really a lot of the best stuff in his vault. A lot of 70s stuff, but some 80s stuff and some great 90s stuff in there. And a lot off the river, really. There was albums where he recorded so much stuff, and he sort of just cherry-picked all the best songs in his vault. It's an amazing box set. Yeah, I mean, Bruce is one of the few artists...

who records in this way where they record so much material and he is perfectly comfortable not putting stuff out, not putting songs out and increasingly not putting whole albums out. And he doesn't go back to stuff on his next records that he could write 70 songs for darkness on edge of town. And when he goes to the river, he starts over. Yeah. And that's a difference between him and Neil Young, who, uh,

also had tremendous amounts of unreleased material, but was more likely to cherry pick it. For instance, he had the Homegrown album that was unreleased for so many years, but he was taking songs from it and sticking them on another album. Yeah, on American Stars and Bars and Hawks and Doves. He saw his vault as less sealed than Bruce saw his in that time. Yeah, and then

In the 2000s, Bruce has been more likely to grab songs from the past. He's loosened up on that front, but still. More from the recent E-Pest. I know on Letter to You, he went way back and got some stuff. And on The Rising, there's Nothing Man and a few others that he went back for. But broadly speaking, the new albums are new material. ♪

Nothing Man is a good segue. Nothing Man is, I am pretty sure, from the sessions that are called in this box set, the Streets of Philadelphia sessions. Right. And so we'll maybe start with that album. Sure. And this album has been sort of lusted after by fans for a long time because Bruce mentioned it as early as the 90s. It was supposed to come out

Yes. Right before what became the Greatest Hits sessions, he ditched it, said, fuck it, got the E Street Band back together, recorded some extra songs for the Greatest Hits, then went and did the Ghost of Tom Joad record. But he talked about it a lot. And Streets of Philadelphia is one of the biggest hits of his career, really. On my own face, brother, you're gonna leave me Wasting away on the streets of Philadelphia

And then there's a song Missing on the Crossing Guard soundtrack, a really obscure, awful movie by Sean Penn. And that's a great song, Missing. Missing. Missing.

So fans had known of this Lost Drum Loop album, the Lost Hip Hop album, as it was called sometimes, which is hilariously off. But it had been talked about for a very long time, to the point that when Brandon Flowers went to Bruce's house a few years ago, and Bruce said to him, is there anything that you want to hear in the vault? He goes, yes, I want the Drum Loop record. Because it's this mythical thing, and most of it has never been heard anywhere else.

anywhere. So he started the whole set with it because I think he knew it was the one that was most lusted after. I think one of the things that's most interesting in addition to the songs themselves, and there's lots to talk about there, I love thinking about the scenarios that could have happened if he had indeed released these records. And I think this is probably the most interesting case of that.

So this, again, would have come out in 94 in the wake of Streets of Philadelphia. So it had a version of Secret Garden on it, a different version that was, again, sort of drum loops based rather than the version he re-recorded with the E Street Band. There's a sea.

And that's one thing. So that probably would have been the first single. And I love the idea of One Beautiful Morning be on the radio. It's sort of a little bit in that Hootie and the Blowfish strumming vein. So I feel like that might have fit in somewhere. One beautiful

The thing is, he would have had to tour it, right? Yeah, I guess. He didn't tour Nebraska, so there's some precedent for now. They had no tour. But he likely would have toured it, which would have been tricky. It would have been perceived, as he mentioned, like as another album about relationships. And more than that, the loop thing is a little bit misleading, because that's definitely how he wrote the songs and how they...

developed. But about half the songs, he brought in members of the somewhat unfairly maligned 92-93 band to flesh them out as full band songs. So when you actually listen to it, it kind of takes off.

at points into kind of just a rock record, or at least not, you know, a sort of solitary loops record. So basically I think the tour would have been an extension of the 92, 93 tour, probably with the same band. Right. Which I think he just knew in his heart, that wasn't the right move. Another tour with that band, as much as I did like those, as I do like those shows, um,

I think he knew it wasn't the right move. And playing these songs live would have been tricky to translate them to the stage in a satisfying way. Say what you will about Human Touch and Lucky Town, but they did have big energetic songs and lots of them. This...

It had, you know, things that could have been interesting live, but as far as an arena show based around this stuff. Yeah. And I think he doesn't meant it like, you know, you did a great interview with him talking about why these things didn't come out and he never mentioned tours as a thing. Right. But I...

personally think, and I don't mean in a venal way, because the next tour he did was the smallest possible tour he could have done. He did a theater tour for Ghost of Tom Joad, but it was a format that he found interesting and doable. Whereas playing a ballady record in arenas with a band isn't so doable. Yeah. And playing the drum loop, like ballady songs in a theater with a small band, it

It wouldn't have worked. If you're going to go small, you have to go really small. And just him and a guitar is effective in a theater. It's also sort of economical. Having a huge band in a theater, it would have been a money-losing, like, sort of oddball, not satisfying anyone tour. And just the image of it would be he's very diminished. The stadium icon is now playing with a band in theaters. It would have just felt small. Also, I mean, not to get...

Now we're really deep in the alternate universe. But then what would have happened is it would have been too big for theaters and they would have been driven back into arenas with this kind of awkwardly placed. So basically it was, in my opinion, close to an untourable album. And I personally think that was a huge factor in this.

Yeah, I do too. He was so psyched by the success of Streets of Philadelphia because his previous two records, they didn't do very well. They weren't loved. And suddenly he has a huge radio hit. He's at the Oscars. He's at the VMAs. He was suddenly...

a star again, really, with that song. He had his first hit in a long time. So I get why he wanted to keep that going. And I get why he realized that he shouldn't keep it going. It's a cool album. I like it very much. So Ron Aniello, who's Bruce's current producer, who we both spoke to a lot, he told Uncut, who also did a great sort of behind the scenes article without Bruce, but talking to everyone else, which can often be a very fruitful approach.

Ron said if it was up to him, he would have redone the loops on this album, which I completely understand that impulse. They are a product of their time. They're dated 90s drum loops. Which is unusual for Bruce. He prides himself in his music not being stuck in the amber of a moment. You could argue that Born in the USA is. You could look at a few others, but mostly it's not.

And this is the only time in the 90s where he made something that sounds really 90s. So yeah, Blind Spot also could have been a single. That was the first single he released from this box set. That's a cool song. Again, with a little bit, perhaps, you know, arguably a little bit of that dated drum move sound, but cool. Everybody's got a blind spot. Brings us down. Another song I really like is Something in the Well. Baby, baby, there's something in the well.

It's a horror movie vibe. It's one of Bruce's most Stephen King-esque songs. It's this kind of return to the theme of many of Bruce's released songs and also that are on some of the previously unreleased songs on this album is this idea of being haunted by your past or haunted by this unknown thing in your psyche. Yeah, it's sort of a theme on the record. It's sort of a dark record when you just look at it lyrically.

I actually have a playlist on Spotify, perhaps revealing too much, called Spooky Bruce. And I'm going to add this to that playlist. Swallowed Up is on that, a bunch of other... It's a vibe he hits occasionally, and I really, really like it. We've been swallowed up.

Really cool. Waiting on the End of the World, it actually came out, it leaked in the E Street Band version. They tried that during the Blood Brothers sessions. It's very similar to the version on this album. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I can feel the poison on the beans I'm waiting on.

It's connected to Streets of Philadelphia and has lyrical similarities to the point where it feels like they had to have been written near simultaneously, that it wasn't something written when he knew Streets of Philadelphia was out. And my theory on Waiting the End of the World is that it was about the character in Philadelphia. It's about someone dying of AIDS and that it was in fact written

This is a guess, but my guess is that it was Bruce's first take on a song for Philadelphia. That makes sense. It really does. That's a smart observation. And then he decided to get more explicit and just sing the name of the movie in the title. Yeah, it's like, needs more Philadelphia. No, I mean, I think Waiting on the End of the World is a little more rocky. And he did say that what was originally requested by Jonathan Demme was a rock anthem. He wanted a rock anthem to connect this movie about...

someone who's gay dying of AIDS to the heartland, you know? Yeah, that makes sense. And he got a great ballad from, that was from Neil Young. So maybe they want to sort of balance them out. The more I think about it, I'm pretty sure that's what that is. And it's super, super interesting to listen to it in that context. And there's another really cool song called Farewell Party. We held a farewell party at the station, there in the arm of

Overall, a very cool record. And again, not fully a drum loop record and definitely a missing piece. And I think I would have preferred this to come out because it would have, it finished the story of the music he was making on the 92-93 tour and the music he was making on Streets of Philadelphia. It's a key missing link between all of it.

Yeah. I think that the big context for this record and for all the records is post-Nebraska, when he was freed from the studio, he was able to experiment at home. And he wasn't tied to a record plant type studio being charged by the hour. And it gave him the freedom to really experiment with synths and drum loops and do stuff like this. In reporting my book, Stories Behind the Songs on Bruce Springsteen, which doesn't include any of these songs, and I have no plans of expanding it, sorry, because that's just

Too much. Too many songs, Bruce. But one of the things that I really got a sense of talking to Toby Scott, who was his engineer on Lucky Town and Human Touch, is how hard Bruce was searching for a new sound. And instead, he kind of looped back on himself. He started doing things that were kind of just a variation of E Street. And it's sort of interesting that this was all happening at the peak of the grunge movement. And unlike so many of his peers, he was like, I'm going nowhere near that.

Right. Well, here's the thing. You know what we know he liked? We know he liked Primal Scream. Right. And that's actually super relevant to this. Because there was that thing, Primal Scream, and I also think of Octung Baby, even something like Jesus Jones, forgive me. Sure. But that was that thing of Soup Dragons, that thing of breakbeats underneath rock and roll songs. And I think that if anything, he was doing that and...

And also, if anything, I wish that he had gone deeper, maybe with some different musicians and production help, he could have gone deeper in a sort of Octung Baby richer thing. Because I think that's what he was basically trying to do. Right. But he didn't have Brian Eno or... Yeah, exactly. Definitely didn't have Brian Eno. But what I was saying is that I think...

He was looking for a sound that really was very on E Street and very different. He didn't really find it, especially on Human Touch. And Lucky Town, I would argue he did some new stuff, but not that new. Right. Whereas this, to his great credit, he at least was in fresh, truly fresh Sonic territory for him. Yeah, for sure. For sure. But he sort of got spooked. Get in the zone, Auto Zone. John always listens to his truck. So when his brakes start talking...

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I think there were so many things going on. It was the tour thing. It was the sense of diminishment. There was a sense of, it was better to put out greatest hits, get all the kind of attention for that, and then put out a deliberately commercially low key folk record than to put out something that could be perceived as another try for the charts and not do that incredibly well. And I'm not saying all of his thinking was that way at all, but I'm just thinking on a commercial level, that might've also been some of the thinking. Yeah.

I think the context of the greatest hits record is hard to understand for people these days. In the mid-90s, or the 80s or whatever, in that time period, if you put out your greatest hits on CD and you put on a few new songs and you sold it hard, it could really be a big career boost. That Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, they put out one in 93. They put Last Dance with Mary Jane on it and had this huge hit, this huge CD that outsold everything in its catalog and reminded younger people of his older songs.

it really worked. I think for Bruce and Sony, they were trying to do the same thing and he pushed that album very hard. Let's dance with Mary Jane One more time to kill

I would like to hear a Secret Garden that is halfway between this Secret Garden and the release one. Because I actually really like the electronic stuff on this one, but I also like the more fully fleshed out version of the E Street one. So I wish that Ron or somebody could combine both and make the ultimate Secret Garden. And then mix and dialogue out of the movie Jerry Maguire. I would like to skip, with all due respect to Cameron...

I think maybe we can do without that, but that is a thing that people don't really know about. But it was all over the radio and it really worked. It was huge. It was huge. The Jerry Maguire mix. I was just about to tell you that I love him. When I did the Secret Garden entry for my book, I talked to Cameron because he was, he personally made that song a hit. You know, that's what happened.

Yeah, again, looking at this album, I think it's really strong. The only song that I don't love is Maybe I Don't Know You is a little weak for me. Maybe I don't know you like I thought I did.

It's the exact same idea of Secret Garden, but not told as poetically. It's like saying the poetic idea of Secret Garden, but just flat out saying it. Like, what are those clothes you're wearing? I don't recognize them. It's like this. It's weird to me. I feel like those two things should not be on the same album. I think that he wrote a better version of it called The Secret Garden. It should have tossed that one. I also think the little things...

It's really weird to me that that is on this, that is from those sessions. I thought that was something he wrote on the road as he toured Tom Joad. It seemed that way because he played that song on stage there and it seemed so Jody. You know sometimes when you're in love

It's a really cool song. I just don't know if it belongs on this record. It's, you know, it's this kind of explicit and detailed kind of romantic song. And it reminds me of the story songs that he was writing. Well, yeah, on...

On something like Highway 29, there's a little bit of that. And on Jode. And then there's also the songs he was writing, like Loose Change in the bass album, which is actually, this is the cousin of. Right. I'm so sorry to anyone who's not a hardcore Bruce fan. This is for, this is not for you. But there was an album that he was writing in the time of Human Touch and Lucky Town that was based around the bass, playing bass.

And they were kind of these minimalist stripped down story songs. I like a lot songs like Loose Change. Yeah. And so it's very much in that vein, I would say. Yeah, for sure. For the Loose Change aficionados out there. Yeah, I'm getting really deep here. But that's, I mean, it is true. No, it is true. Loose Change. I would like to know the exact moment that he wrote The Ghost of Tom Joad. Waiting for the ghost of Tom Joad.

That's such a staggering song that I wonder if he realized this is a new direction. He has to sort of make this the focal point of a different project. Well, it's interesting because we've never heard it. In Andy's interview, there was an amazing bit that I'm sure you've heard where he asked him about the...

electric sessions for the album Nebraska and Bruce said they didn't exist but then went back and checked and they did exist and texted Andy about it you could have really confounded him by asking him about the version of Tom Jode recorded by the E Street Band during the greatest hit session and then he would have been like that doesn't exist and he would have had to text you again but

By all accounts, he did attempt to record what became the title track of Ghost of Tom Joad with the East Street Band in the greatest hit session. So we know he had written it by then. Yeah. Because I would imagine, I think that's one of the best songs he wrote the entire decade, the 90s. And he probably knew it at the time.

Yeah, so that is an interesting question. And that also could have been the heart of an E Street Band record, too. That would have been the other way to go. But it's interesting, you could take a ghost of Tom Joad, Blood Brothers, and then all he'd have to do is write 10 other great songs in 1994 when it was the last thing he felt like doing, which wasn't going to happen. Yeah, he needed to do the Tom Joad tour before the E Street Band could reform and tour. It had to happen. It was a key step to reboot himself.

staying in the 90s. As we said, he did greatest hits. Then he recorded Ghost of Tom Joad. And he recorded Ghost of Tom Joad in a really interesting way. He gathered this small band that included Danny Federici from the E Street Band, included Gary Talent from the E Street Band, but it also included other musicians, including Gary Malabar, who is the great drummer who played with Van Morrison and also played on a bunch of Steve Miller hits. Like a real, just a fantastic drummer. Like,

awesome drummer. And also this guy, Marty Rifkin, who I've talked to. Have you talked to him? No. He's the nicest guy. I talked to him for my book and he is a fantastic steel guitar player. And Ghost of Tom Jode was recorded live in this room in Bruce's LA house, this really great sounding room. And

that was recorded in the evening. During the daytime, he was recording all these fun rockabilly songs. And it's very confusing what they released it as. On the box set, it's known as somewhere north of Nashville. And here's the

this super confusing fact about that that we learned from the Uncut story, which is, so Somewhere North of Nashville in a different version is released on the Western Stars album in 2012. I can already feel people getting confused. Somewhere north of Nashville, how long we... By the fact that there's a different version of Somewhere North of Nashville included on this album. Somewhere north of Nashville,

We all assumed then that there was a big revelation, which is he had actually written Somewhere North of Nashville in 94 and saved it all these years. But we now know for reasons just to fill out the album, he included a version of this song Somewhere North of Nashville that was actually recorded in the early 2010s, along with these songs recorded in 1994. So it gives...

It gives even the most dedicated fan a headache. It's confusing, but they thematically work together. But even more confusing, to make it insanely confusing, and this really confused me the first time I heard it. While he didn't really have a full complement of rockabilly-esque songs written, not even close. So what he started doing for reasons that will be interesting to someday understand, I guess he was just flipping through his notebook of songs.

And so he started recording two released B-sides from Born USA. One of my favorite sort of Bruce deep cuts, Janie Don't You Lose Heart. Oh, yeah. Great song. He recorded a sort of countrified version of it that's really delightful, possibly better than the original version. Yeah. Really good. So he recorded that. Janie Don't You Lose Heart.

And he also recorded another fantastic B-side, which actually there's a kind of a small country hit cover of it. It became something in the country world, but it's this song Stand On It that is just fantastic. Stand on it.

I think he didn't mean to ever release those on an album. It was just them screwing around. And he was thinking about a possible double record at that time, or a single record, the best songs of both. And he realized you couldn't put some of these songs by straight time or anything. As he said to you. As he said to me, it just wouldn't flow. You were like, when did you realize there were two records? And he's like, well, as you can tell, none of this would have worked with straight time. Like basically like...

So those two release songs from Boreasay, and then it gets really crazy. There is a song on this box that is called Under a Big Sky. Really cool song. Under a big sky.

In the studio records, I believe it's under The Big Sky, but it's almost certainly the same song. It's a lost Borneo SA outtake from very late in the Borneo SA session. So he threw that in, which is like just wildly obscure. And then also the song Delivery Man is also from that era. Well, I'm a delivery man.

He was in a real Born USA vibe. He was picking up the vibe of those songs. It's very peculiar, a group of stuff when you look at it that way. But if you don't think about that, it fits really well together. And it's just, it's a really fun, it's a bit of, you know, like perhaps like a trifle in places. Like it would have been one of his most fun and unexpected albums, but he has great stuff like

Tiger Rose, which actually is a song we've heard and Gary Talent produced it for this rockabilly artist, whatever. We've heard a version of it.

Repo Man, which is, is Repo Man the one that he randomly played at a birthday party? No, that's Detail Man. Oh, Detail Man. It's confusing that there's Detail Man and Repo Man. Also, there's too many man songs. There's Delivery Man, Repo Man, and Detail Man. It's too much. He went to John Fogerty's 50th birthday party in this exact moment in time, played Detail Man. It was filmed by John Stamos of Full House fame. I think this was last season of Full House when he was here.

And like two years ago, he posted on his Instagram. So we first heard like Detail Man from the John Stamos like bootleg. Super weird. It's definitely like a weird batch of stuff. It's definitely like a grab bag of stuff. But there's also the really cool song Silver Mountain. That's where I'll wait for you.

And You're Gonna Miss Me When I'm Gone, which is really cool. And Blue Highway, which is awesome. Oh, yeah. When I was listening to Blue Highway, I was thinking, could have thrown this on to Jode.

He definitely, I think to his credit and possibly you can argue about it, but possibly to the album's detriment is he can get very close to rigid ideas of what an album is where he could take songs from this project and then live in another project. I think if he had taken one or two songs from this and put that on Jode, it might've made it a kind of richer and more varied album, but he has a vision and he wants to hold to that vision. Yeah. There's a purity to Joe that he was really into both sonically and lyrically. Yeah.

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Let's jump back to the earliest point in this box set, which is 1983. Very strange thing. Bruce had recorded everything except maybe Dancing in the Dark and My Hometown that would end up being on Born USA. But he just, he had, as a song he would record suggests, he had an unsatisfied heart. He just wasn't ready to release that stuff. He was still had that...

Nebraska vibe, right? Yeah. As he told me, he just made Nebraska. He loved the experience of recording at home and the thought of going back into a studio like he did on the river and doing a real polished album. It's just was rubbing him the wrong way. He wanted to find some sort of middle ground between the river and Nebraska as far as the way that he made those records.

Yeah. Even though, again, he had already basically done Borneo Say. That's the weird part. But he wasn't digging it. It's weird to me that, you know, they're making a movie, they made a movie about Nebraska, obviously, but which includes some of the making of Borneo Say, but the making of Borneo Say is so peculiar because in the first like couple weeks, basically, he recorded many of the great songs that he, he knocked that off in two weeks and then spent the next two years driving himself insane, going in a

a billion other directions, including these garage sessions.

A lot of this was bootlegged. So fans are more aware of this stuff than a lot of the other stuff on the album. Although the specific takes on the record weren't necessarily bootlegged and it's better sound quality. Yeah, for sure. No, I've heard all the bootlegs. There's so much. There's so many bootlegs from this time period. It's an interesting hybrid, right? It's this full band sound, but it's with 1983 one-man band technology. Yeah.

Yeah, so the sound quality is not really the same as the rest of the record. And the arrangements are interesting. It's kind of... You can hear him learning in the studio how to do this. How to layer synthesizers and drum machines. And it gets sort of more and more sophisticated as it goes on. He said to you that it's the bridge between Nebraska and Borneo Say...

But it's also the bridge between Borneo Say and Tunnel of Love. For sure. For sure. And I can just imagine Sony hearing this stuff and being like, this is not what we want. If Nebraska is lo-fi, this is kind of mid-fi? It's mid-fi. And I imagine Sony was like, we want more Hungry Hearts. Enough of this. We indulged you once. We won't again. But the thing is, that didn't happen because Sony never heard any of this. I know. I'm just imagining if he filed.

this, they would have been horrified. Right. The thing is, unlike the other things, this section of the box set is really, and it has great stuff on it, but it's more like an archive dump. For instance, there's two versions of the very excellent song Fugitives Dream. I thought I could hold all my balls I tried to keep. There's an alternate version of My Hometown that's kind of rough. I was eight years old and running with a dime.

There's no way that would have been the released version. This is more like a sort of official bootleg, frankly. Yeah. I love the version of Shut Out the Light on there, which is a B-side from Born USA. He played live a lot. But there's a new verse to it, and it's a really haunting song. Throw your arms.

Yeah. And the one that everyone talks about is this song, Unsatisfied Heart, which is a really cool, fully developed song. Yeah.

It anticipates the movie A History of Violence because it's a classic noir plot. Right. Like someone escaped their past. They did something bad in their past, but they've escaped to this peaceful life. And then someone from that past comes to them. And that's basically the plot of this song. I always kind of felt History of Violence was very Bruce-coded, actually. It is very Nebraska Bruce-coded. So it kind of fits this idea, metaphorically, of...

haunted by their past, someone who doesn't really feel like they deserve their life and not to get like blasphemed

blatantly psychoanalytical, but I feel that it was coming from a very deep place from Bruce Springsteen in 1983, who as we'll learn in the movie, Deliver Me From Nowhere was, was, you know, he had to think about his whole life before he released Born Here. It's literally it, right? Yeah, it's true. And for the first time he had actual money in his pocket that the River Tour was successful. He was finally becoming like a independently wealthy man.

Which I think sent him into this, was part of what sent him into this state of self-examination. And I literally think that's what these garage sessions were in part, is he literally had to think about his whole life before he could release Born USA and accept his destiny of pop stardom. Yeah, and then turn away from it as hard as he possibly could. Yes, but I think, you know, these songs were exploring the artistic things he felt he needed to explore, but they also were exploring some of the psychological stuff.

he needed to explore. So in, no spoilers, but in Deliver Me From Nowhere, they're going to make a big deal, at least from what I hear, of the Song County Fair. And that's because, as he reveals in his book, he had an incident actually as he was driving out to L.A. to the little house in, I think, Laurel Canyon, where he actually recorded this stuff. ♪ County Fair, County Fair ♪

On that drive, literally on the way to this album, he and his friends stopped at this county fair in this small town. And he had this experience he described where he saw these people and their lives and their community. And he felt so profoundly outside of him. And it's literally like the existential floor below him just opened.

opened wide there was a hole in his floor but you know like basically like the hole to the abyss opened he suddenly felt like empty and his whole everything you've been bottling up his whole life suddenly opened up yeah it's true that he was really separate from a lot of the country at that point he came from you know an impoverished background and he was no longer in that world he was an outsider he was an outsider and he was at that point

He had lived his whole life on the road. Ironically, he lived his whole life like it was a movie. You know, he had no kids. He had no wife. His relationships came and went. And he had not grappled with his childhood.

He had not... Again, I feel like this is all a trailer for this movie, the more I talk about it. But if it ties in with the movie, this is where it ties in, is you hear a lot of what was going on there. But anyway, the Song County Fair is, on the surface, this kind of ode to an evening at a county fair. But when you know...

And I wrote about this in my book. And then Warren Zane's wrote about it in his book on Nebraska, that it is true. It turns out that was my guess. It turns out it is true that this song is like the kind of like crux point. It's all about really that it's about that day. It's about one of the most important days of his life. And so it's super interesting. And that, that kind of just, I think backs up the idea that that's what these sessions were about. It was about him excavating his psyche to a large extent. Yeah.

And as you said, right, figuring out this mode is as great as he was recording with the East Street Band. He did. He preferred this. Yeah. Yeah. He really liked working on his own. It was a huge thrill for him to be free.

of the studio. And he was loving it. And that's the way he's worked for the past few decades, too, outside of major studios. And also free from a process that was like, okay, boys, you ready for take 51? Yeah, it was pulling teeth. The recording of Born to Run in darkness was torturous. And he definitely was recording in what even was for the time a retro fashion. If he wanted to re-sing it,

you know, he would just have the band play it. So he was kind of also just entering the modern world. Yeah. He had, you know, he was obviously, he was very good at playing music on stage to capture it on record was always a bit of a struggle.

So, Ron, his producer also told Uncut that if it would have been up to him, he would have cleaned up these songs sonically. And that might have, again, might have been my preference as well, or at least it would have been interesting to hear them this way. Because as of now, there's a definite 80s artifact element to them. I like that, though. I hate when they clean up things from the past on those Rolling Stones box sets and mixings in U-verse. There's no drum track.

I want it to be of the time, warts and all. Factually, it is true. Going back to as early as like the Dave Marsh book, Glory Days, he talked about the fact that he thought about trying to assemble an album. If he had released some kind of album from these sessions, although I have a little bit of a hard time picturing it, it would have made the jump from Nebraska to Borneo, USA impossible.

seem less sudden. Right. When he says it's a bridge between Nebraska and Borneo, I say chronologically it doesn't even work because of how much of Borneo was actually recorded before. But released. But yeah, sonically it is a bridge. And from the listener's perspective that to go from reason to believe to dance in the dark is jarring. Yeah. It's like he went back and tried to build the bridge. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. In 83. Yeah.

If you look in his notebooks of all the proposed track listings for Born USA, he was thinking about where incorporated much of those songs. These were never really in that track listing and those track listings that he worked on. Although it is interesting that My Hometown came from this session. Yeah, for sure. Which he views as a crucial bookend on Born USA to end the album. Yeah, no, it's impossible to picture the album without it. My

There really is a segment of Bruce fans who almost act like anything after 1985 is like inherently suspect. Yeah, it's not their childhood. It's not the golden era. They like the first 12 years, then even Tunnel of Love to them is the beginning of the decline.

And then they kind of stopped caring. In general, I think that this is just more proof that his creativity most certainly did not stop in 1985. This whole box set is a huge slab of proof about that. The main story of the box set is just the 90s.

which he's saying now that he's never thought of it as his wilderness years, even though that's a term that he himself has used before. Super funny. I say this with all great affection. He said, I believe to you and other people, he said, there's this idea out here, basically, that I don't know where people got that the 90s were some kind of loss period or something. And it's just not true.

And as someone pointed out to me that I looked it up in David Frick's interview around 2012, Bruce himself called the 90s a lost period and said that he didn't put out that much work and it wasn't his best work. But I guess he just wasn't thinking of this. Even he wasn't thinking of this unreleased stuff at that point. And when he went back and remembered all this stuff, then he revised his own opinion of his 90s. Yeah, that most of his box set is from the 90s. He made a crazy amount of music that he didn't release. Yeah.

between Human Touch and Lucky Town in 92 and The Rising in 02. He put out a single new studio record, 10 years, one record. You asked him if he had gotten Gunshine. He said no, but I don't know if the record bears that out. I think that the...

the commercial failure of relative commercial failure because now someone would you know if someone sold as many physical copies as lucky town and touch did now they'd be hailed as a savior of the entire record industry but if you went to used record stores in 96 a lot like i did there was piles of those records not as many as rem's monster though yeah you're right

There's still, I'm actually sitting right now on a chair constructed of copies of R.A.M.'s Monster. So I think it's hard to argue that he didn't get gun-shy when, again, he went 10 years with one record and kept shelving them over and over and over again. So during the Ghost of Tom Joad tour...

He found for the first time that after shows late at night, he wasn't physically exhausted because he was just standing there playing guitar. Or telling long stories about the Gapes of Wrath. Yes. Doing both. But that was not nearly as exhausting as sprinting across the stage and ending with a kiss on the lips to Clarence Clemons. That stuff, that will take it out of you. Yeah.

He found that, you know, his voice wasn't blown out and that he wasn't tired. And he talked... He's talked over the years that he would come home to his hotel room and the only time this ever happened, because he wasn't exhausted, he would write and write and write. Yeah, which gives us Devils in Dust, at least most of those songs. Yeah.

And we now know also gave us, for the most part, this album called Inyo. Yeah. That was... He told you, I think, that it was basically of a piece with... It was part... Devils in Dust was a chunk broken off of all these songs he was writing at the time. And Inyo was another chunk of the Devils in Dust era. And what's interesting is, like some of the songs on Devils in Dust, the Tom Joad storytelling thing with...

more melodicism, better choruses. The title track is a story song about the kind of the history of water wars in Los Angeles. ♪ Feeling right now ♪

Super ambitious thing to write a song about. But what's cool about it is it actually has a really catchy chorus, which is true of Youngstown, but isn't true of a lot of the other songs on Ghost of Tom Joe that are story songs. Some of them are just basically recitations of the lyrics that are cool, but don't have a lot of musicality. But something like the title track shows that he really found this really cool balance. Yeah, for sure.

And just moving to California changed so much for him. He would ride his motorcycle all over the state. He would read the LA Times every single day. He got really just immersed in the 90s world of California and all the politics of that.

And he also, I guess he had this guy who worked on his ranch, who he became friends with, who is literally like a cowboy from Mexico. But was that in the 2010s though? I'm so confused. I'll leave this in, but I get very confused about the chronology. There's a couple songs on this that were written later. Yeah. The mariachi stuff, I think was a little later. He was back in New Jersey. So, okay. So yes. Okay. So that brings me to, now I'm getting the chronology right. So

One of the most incredible songs on this whole box set, The Lost Charo, which we knew existed because Patti Scalfa leaked a session of it years ago on Instagram. It was in 2014. She put up a video of him recording with a mariachi band. And we were like, what the hell is this? Yeah.

So in this weird splicey way that he's doing things, he recorded a couple songs. He recorded that and another song around the Western Stars era, circa 2012, and stuck those on the set. But yeah, that song...

Oh my God, that song, The Lost Charles, is incredible. It's a top tier Bruce song and it sounds like nothing else he's ever recorded. It's gorgeous. It's incredible. Yeah. There's a few great songs in this. I think a lot of people, this is their favorite album. One of the least commercial probably, but it's one of the coolest and most interesting albums. There's an amazing story song called Our Lady of Monroe about this ex-cop,

having this sort of spiritual revelation and that is a killer, killer song. Oh yeah. It's like a full movie in a song. It's really staggering. South on the Jersey Turnpike to the Lady of Momma

Really cool record. And I think, you know, I could imagine another artist being hit with like cultural appropriation type stuff, but it's so respectful and there's no pretense that he's a Spanish speaker, that this is his culture. He's just, he's just telling the stories. And what's super, super interesting is that, and this just, it just hasn't crossed over because the audience who knows about Bruce box set and the audience who keeps up with this kind of thing is so separate, but it's,

There's a huge boom in Mexican regional music, which is basically Mexican folk music. On a commercial level, we've had people on the cover of Rolling Stone for the Future of Music issue who work in this genre. This might be the hippest thing that Prince has done in years. Just by coincidence, yeah. It's like his Seeger sessions with Mexican regional music. I wish...

Again, though, there's such a... The number of people who follow both things is very, very small. It's very minimal. And it's just a few songs on the record. Absolutely. It's been misconstrued as a mariachi record. But yes, the only thing that's perhaps as surprising as that is this album, Twilight Hours. And that album was made at the same time as Western Stars. And both of those albums really came out of working on a dream, which is where he was trying to do...

more ambitious kind of chamber pop stuff, but in a sort of meshing it with the E Street sound. And so a lot of people didn't like it, but he was trying to write more sophisticated songs. And so he took that and did it on a much bigger scale. We knew with Western Stars, but it turns out that was just a half of it.

The Twilight Hour stuff is much more in a Burt Bacharach, Frank Sinatra almost vein. Yeah, as he said to me when I asked him about it, Western Stars is very Jimmy Webb, Glen Campbell, and Twilight Hours is more Sinatra, Burt Bacharach, which you can really hear. A lot of this is really cool because it fills in blanks. And one of the things that this fills in the blanks of is a couple of things. He kept saying in advance, I'm making an album that sounds like Burt Bacharach.

And when Western Stars came out, everyone's like, oh, that's the album. And it is that album, but this is way more that. And so now you really get it. Number one. Number two is this mystery that we've talked about for years, which is he said to me in 2012 when I interviewed him for the Darkness box set. I was making small talk with him. It was something about wearing tie. We were talking about kids wearing ties in New Jersey private schools.

And he said, you know, it's funny. I just wrote my first ever song about a guy wearing a tie. Now we've gone through several theories. We thought maybe it was the guy from wrecking ball. I now I'm almost positive because there's explicit references on this album to guys like Steve,

cinching up their ties and going out and stuff. It's a hundred percent this album. I'm positive. Yeah, you're right. It's this album. You're right. So it's just really funny to fill in these, to fill in like 13 years later, to fill in like little, uh, the lore from 13 year old little hints. So that is what he was talking about. Yeah. Wow. Yeah. Because if he was like, yeah, I just made like a Frank Sinatra record. People would be like, what? You know, this is another one where it's really cool to imagine how he would have

If he released this, he would have had to go all the way. He would have had to basically like put on a tux and do like a thing with an orchestra and really go for it. And I think that's part of it is part of it is like he had to picture like, okay, do I want to put on the tux or am I going to look, is this going to be weird? He would put the tux on, but he told me that it's possible one day he will do live concerts that will be backed by an orchestra, which would be very different than anything he's ever done by far.

Yeah. And he can do this stuff. He could do, you know, he could do Jungleland. He could do, you know. Yeah. There's, because every tour, because every tour he's done in the past 19 years has been E Street band. And so it has limited the songs he can play. He could do a whole other pool of songs with a different setup and it'd be pretty incredible.

It's been a long time since he did a band tour that wasn't the issue band. It was, it's really the only times he did that with the other band in 92 and then with the Seeger sessions band. So it would be cool to do that one more time. I think it's,

It's just tough to go from, you know, when your stadium thing is so beloved, it's tough to do a different thing. And the Sessage band in the States, they had some soft markets and I think that probably freaked them out. It's so much easier to play a stadium and have everyone love it. You know, it's just, who could blame them?

Yeah, so a song you mentioned to Bruce, and I think everyone is picking out as a high point from the Twilight Hours thing is High Sierra, which is just a really cool heartbreak song that is really fully realized. Apparently, Ron told Uncut that at the time, it definitely was on Western Stars track listing, but it was actually Bruce who decided it was unfinished. Yeah, and I think Bruce feels that he possibly made a mistake there by not putting it on Western Stars. One day a man came through town

Someone I used to know. In another weird sort of sandwiching in, the song I'll Stand By You, which he wrote for the Harry Potter movie and was roundly rejected by J.K. Rowling, is sort of sandwiched into that album where I don't 100% think it fits that well. It does, yeah. I think that song, he just wanted to put it somewhere and time-wise it just fit here somewhat, but you're right. It's a different kind of thing. I'll stand by you.

I really like Sunday Love, the opening track. Yeah, it's great. A song I really like is Dinner at Eight. It really embodies the thing he's trying to do on this album. What mistakes did I make?

Honestly, what it reminds me of, he probably wasn't thinking of it. They remind me of the albums that Elvis Costello did with Burt Bacharach, Pinned from Memory. It has that vibe. I mean, maybe that's because that's the Burt Bacharach stuff I listen to most. So maybe that's just me saying it reminds me of Burt Bacharach. No, I think you're right. But that was Burt's style. I also, when I was listening to this, I kept thinking that it could have been a really strong double record.

Yeah, with Western stars. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, because you could meld them. And again, like he said to you, there's times when he thinks about the double album, but he tends to go for the more intensely focused one. Yeah, it's really just the river where he went for the double. Even though in the CD era, there would be doubles back in the day. Yeah.

I think with The Rising, he actually basically released the double album. Like, that was definitely a case where he told Brendan O'Brien, like, I'm going to put everything on this. Yeah, and that was a mistake. Yeah. Well, certainly Brendan thinks so. Oh, it's definitely too long. Yeah. So that was another time when he just wasn't sure, and so he put everything on there. But yeah, it's a cool album. It probably would have been better mixed with the Western Star stuff, I agree. And I can understand his hesitation. Again, he would have had to put on the suit and do the thing, and it's just...

I think putting on the cowboy hat and doing that thing was probably more comfortable for him. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, that was much bruisier than the tux. Because I do think this thinking does come into the thing because when you release the thing, you have to promote it. You have to be that for a while. And do you want to be that guy in the suit? Is the world ready for that? And he did talk about that. And I think actually that's an important broader point, which is a lot of the stuff on this

Is Bruce taking off, unzipping the Bruce Springsteen suit, right? Yeah, for sure.

yeah, it's showing different sides of himself that he's kept hidden. Right. It's him not being Bruce with a capital B, not being the stadium guy. And it shows he's not considered a shapeshifter like a David Bowie. Right. But it's all there. He hasn't released it. When he releases magic and puts out a radio nowhere, that's the Bruce people know and are comfortable with and that he was more comfortable than putting out. I think...

I think it does, this and the original tracks do tend to show that he's, look, he's still Bruce Springsteen. He's still not, he's not David Bowie. He doesn't go as far as those people. He's not, you know, he's not a person who completely reinvents themselves from album to album. But he is more of a musical shapeshifter than people give him credit for. Yeah, for sure.

He threw in this group of songs that he called Perfect World. And that stuff is, it's like mostly, it's 2000s stuff. It's mid-90s to very early aughts before 9-11. He was writing a bunch of songs in the mid-90s with Joker Shecky and someone up on American Babylon. That was the period they really worked together.

And then when the East Street Band reunited, there was Land of Hope and Dreams, there was Blood Brothers, and then him and Gruszewski started to write again. There was Code of Silence and Another Thin Line. Then he brought the East Street Band in the studio with Toby Scott and that team.

And they tried to record stuff and Bruce didn't dig it. And he realized that he really had to sort of get a new team behind him. And as soon as Ben O'Brien came in the picture, he just sort of dumped all that stuff from before. Yeah. And I think in this particular case, I think these songs are good. I'm glad they came out. They feel relatively inessential to me.

Yeah, no, I like some of them. I think he just had such a grab bag of stuff from this time. It's the only record here that wasn't conceived as a record. This is like the fifth disc on tracks or something. Just this kind of like just random songs from an era. Yeah, it was him getting back into the practice of writing rock songs after sort of taking a break from it. It feels like...

someone getting their swing back, but not fully there. They're fine. And he knew that. He knew that it was time for a big change, and that he knew that these weren't strong enough, as great as some of the songs are. Yeah, I mean, I think if you compare them to something like Lonesome Day or whatever, you really see that he didn't fully have his rock song mojo at that particular point. No, and after 9-11 and everything, he had really focused, and things came quickly. Joke's on me, quick.

I think the ones with Joe Groszczyk are some of the best ones. I actually really like I'm Not Sleeping and Idiot's Delight and Another Thin Line. They're great, yeah. Joe was a great songwriter. I like Joe's albums. I see Joe in concert when he comes around. He's a real overlooked talent. And he was a strong lyricist, which really helped Bruce out here. And then finally...

There's this really mysterious, cool little album called Faithless that was made in the early 2000s for a movie that never came to production. And there was a book too. Yes. It's a movie based on a book. Yeah. That he was shown a screenplay and a book, uh,

by a filmmaker he refused to name and I tried he wouldn't tell me and went down to Wellington Florida they have a house by where the horses are down there for his daughter's events and in two weeks he just banged out this entire soundtrack to a movie that was never made

The fans are trying to track down what this is. There's a couple possibilities. There's a possibility that it's a Martin Scorsese adaptation of this book about nuns and a cowboy. There's another possibility that it's from an adaptation of a Cormac McCarthy book. It's not clear. I think it's probably one or the other. It probably is. And it may sound crazy to think that Scorsese couldn't get funding for

but some of his less commercial projects like Kundan and Silence, it was really hard for him to get money to make big budget movies that aren't going to sell tickets. Sure, yeah. I mean, if anyone saw the studio with Scorsese, you know, if it's not about Kool-Aid Manic, it could be a problem. Yeah, I think it's perfectly possible that it was Scorsese. And I also don't

I don't think it matters. It only would be interesting to try to match the songs to this story. Yeah. But, you know, it's pretty vague.

What I wonder is if Bruce said that Rocky Ground was from a gospel project. Remember he told me that? Right. And then, and I said, what do you mean? What gospel project? And he said he didn't want to say because it was still possibly in play. And then he sort of said it might be, I think he said it was a film that was connected to a film. So I, I do wonder whether it's possible that Rocky Ground was originally from this. Yeah, it's very possible. It would definitely fit into it thematically. Okay.

Rise up, shepherd, rise up. It is funny that Bruce, as much as he keeps these things quiet, he also does drop a lot of breadcrumbs and sometimes it can cause a lot of confusion over the years as to exactly what, because that's definitely one I've seen fans being like, what the hell was that? Yeah, yeah, yeah, because he's been game a lot in the past to work on soundtracks, so at least these weird one-offs.

So yeah, this one I'm still, I'm quite honestly still wrapping my head around. There's a lot of, there's the desert, which is kind of like a, just a soundscape. I really like where you're going, where you're from, which is pretty mesmerizing. Where you're from, where you're from.

Going to California is very pretty. Unfortunately, not a cover of the Zeppelin song. That would be amazing. That would be awesome. Yeah. I mean...

To be quite honest, this is the one that I'm still most wrapping my head around still. I mean, there's a lot of music. I'm still just absorbing it. I guess I would like to know more about the movie and the book. That might help. Yeah, but I don't think he's talking. It's very interesting. He would finish things and then he would move on to the next thing. He would leave things half finished. And this case is unique because it was for a movie that just didn't happen.

It's also weird that he fully finished it before there was even a movie, which isn't the way movie scores work, by the way. I think he just got really... Yeah, that you need to pair the score to the images they show you. Yeah, John Williams didn't write the Star Wars score before George Lucas sold the movie. That's not how it works. I think he just got really... He was really bored and floored or something and really inspired, and it just came out of him very quickly. One thing I think that aspiring creative people can learn from these great artists is that they finish what they start. Even if they never put it out...

They're not bullshitting. They're not just like, they don't like half try to write a song and then they put it aside. I mean, I guess they do that sometimes, but a lot of times they take these things all the way to the end. They fucking record them. They even master them. And then they throw them out. They don't just like write a couple of lines and then like give up. They fucking finish these things. And it's, it's instructive. And there's even more coming. He has tracks three all sketched out.

Tracks 3, The Revenge. And it's very interesting. Maybe Tracks 3 will now have Electric Nebraska on it solely because you reminded him of something that flat out is very confusing because...

It is, well, if you look at what he precisely said to you, it was a little bit semantics because he did acknowledge that they recorded some songs from Nebraska with the Easter Band. I think it was just the question of was it like three or was it seven? And I think it's as we know because the thing is, Bruce Springsteen isn't a Bruce Springsteen nerd. He's living his life as Bruce Springsteen. He doesn't go back. He didn't read Clinton Halen's book where he went and got the Sony track listings and said exactly what's in the vault.

So he doesn't know. He just has his memory from 1982, which is a very long time ago. He doesn't scour over Dave Marsh's glory days. And so he forgot that it's a big plot point that they attempted to record a bunch of these songs. And even so, he did acknowledge to you that they tried. He just didn't remember how many songs. That's all it is. That's all it is. And he said tracks three is not going to be albums. It's a grab bag.

And I think it will go back further, back to the 70s. Yeah, and we know some of the stuff that's missing. But the fun part is there's some stuff that we have no idea of. Yeah, sure. It is also confusing, though, because there definitely were more albums. We know that there were, Ron just talked about that in Uncut, that there definitely was a version of this box set that had more albums. And if Trax 3 isn't a whole album, then there's more missing stuff. Well, he told me after Trax 3, the vault would be pretty close to empty. Yeah.

That was at the same time he told you there was no Electric Nebraska. So you may have personally created tracks for it. That's a legacy. Yeah, that will be on my tombstone. I inspired tracks for it to happen. I reminded Bruce Springsteen that he did try the Nebraska songs. Well, this has been quite a journey through tracks to the Lost Albums. Andy, thank you for joining me. Sure, it was no problem. Thank you.

And that's our show. We'll be back next week. In the meantime, subscribe to Rolling Stone Music Now wherever you get your podcasts. And please leave us five stars and a nice review on Apple Podcasts and Spotify because that's always appreciated. But as always, thanks so much for listening and we will see you next week. Panoply.