Covering Tracks II

Open plea for mindshare, comments, etc.

So what’s the appropriate way to address Bruce Springsteen’s latest?

What are Bruce fans expecting? Bruce haters?

What kind of written exploration – essay, news story, deep dive, nuggetized capsule review, whatever — would be useful to someone with a slight passing interest in Bruce’s back pages? How do other music journalists, those here on the Substack and the hardy few still toiling at publications, plan to approach this?

Asking for real.

Because Tracks II: The Lost Albums, out Friday, is an unprecedented bulk load: 7 (count ‘em!) previously unissued albums featuring original songs that were created by the New Jersey rock icon at various times during his long career – and then shelved. Lots of ink has already been spilled on it, including this finely wrought profile by Jon Pareles in the New York Times.

From a distance, the hefty set mirrors other vault-clearing projects, like Bob Dylan’s Bootleg Series. But the Dylan rarities offer alternate takes and jams that are mostly related to existing classic albums. Springsteen is sharing album-length releases of archived content – songs he wrote in close proximity to each other, while exploring particular sounds, production styles, arrangement ideas.

As Springsteen explains in the Times piece: “These were actual albums that were of a piece, of a moment, of a genre — that fell together, often while working on other albums.”

What he doesn’t say, but could, is that a handful of the “other albums” reside, permanently, on the top shelf of rock history among the music’s stone cold classics. Those who are disciples of the united church of rock and roll – even and maybe especially the lapsed Boss fans who jumped out of the convertible around the time of Born In the U.S.A. and didn’t look back – might not be curious about a new 2025 studio album from Springsteen. Understandable! But they might be extremely curious about The L.A. Garage Sessions, drawn from stark recordings Springsteen made with guitar and drum machine after the release of Nebraska (1982). Here’s a link to a piece I wrote for Tidal on Nebraska’s 40th anniversary.

And that’s just one sliver of Tracks II. There are six more. Each with a backstory and a making-of story, and so on.

Now that Springsteen is turning them loose en masse, each of the seven projects on Tracks II will have a spot in the discography. Does that mean they should each be addressed separately, explored as albums that can reveal things we don’t already know about Springsteen?

If so, do critics have a responsibility to treat them as individual works? That means burrowing into each one of them, and the adjacent titles in the catalog, to glean contextual understanding. How many readers are going to devour 7 record reviews on Springsteen archival material from one writer? If you picked four writers to track on Tracks II, that could mean 28 pieces. Does that sound like summer to you? Or homework?

[Here let’s pause to note a very real factor in this: The human limitations of music journalists. Very few are able to absorb and then write passionately about an album after a single listen. (And even those who do it perhaps shouldn’t…). It takes time for an album to seep into any listener’s imagination, for its hidden details to emerge, for its aims to clarify. That repeat-exposure process, much trampled (ignored?) in the age of streaming, teaches us more than a critical/analytical deep-dive ever could about what any album has to say. End of sermon.….]

Is it OK to treat Tracks II as a single archival document, the way classical music critics frequently do with extra large multi-volume anthologies? This allows for the sweeping overall appraisal – and will inevitably lead to overheated prose in the key of “Who knew Bruce Springsteen was such a songwriting machine?” Answer: Anyone who was paying attention.

Maybe a clickbait-style highlight reel – Ten Tracks That Tell All About Tracks II or somesuch – is plenty?

We’re likely to see all of those approaches, and more besides as the 7 albums begin to circulate in the culture. Hopefully the journalism will examine (and celebrate) some of Springsteen’s tactics as a writer and studio creature, the rare wily veteran who still has fun catching the first inspiration and then building it out, tone by tone, into a finished track.

That’s not where it ends for Springsteen, however. As Tracks II makes clear, he then schemes out the rough dimensions of a “home” for the track – searching for other songs that might align sonically or lyrically, seeking the thread of a theme or the outline of a plan (sorry!). He’s a product of the album era who, with this release, is affirming some things about the album and the discipline of album-making. As not just an art statement but also a kind of transformational vessel, the bucket of spare parts that somehow, by magic and hard work and (yes) luck, becomes a cosmology.