Bruce Springsteen Is Dropping A TON of Unreleased Music Tomorrow on "Tracks Vol. II: The Lost Albums"
Variety - Bruce Springsteen will release a project called “Tracks II: The Lost Albums” on Thursday, the singer announced on social media Wednesday morning. No further information was provided, but the first volume of “Tracks” was 4-CD, 66-song collection of unreleased material from across his career that was issued in 1998.
The video accompanying the announcement, which is soundtracked by instrumental music, shows studio paperwork dated from 1993 (the session for his Oscar-winning song “Streets of Philadelphia”) and 1997 and includes the tagline, “What was lost has now been found.” It also includes the date April 3, 2025 — tomorrow — but it’s unclear whether the album, or merely more information, will be unveiled on that day.
Back in 2017, in an exclusive interview Springsteen did with Variety, he was asked about material he'd recorded over the course of his career that hadn't seen the light of day, and why. His response was, “We’ve made many more records than we released. Why didn’t we release those records? I didn’t think they were essential. I might have thought they were good, I might have had fun making them, and we’ve released plenty of that music [on archival collections over the years]. But over my entire work life, I felt like I released what was essential at a certain moment, and what I got in return was a very sharp definition of who I was, what I want to do, what I was singing about. And I still basically judge what I’m doing by the same set of rules.”
Well it seems like we're finally getting our wish. And holy shit, are we ever. 66 tracks is an insane amount of material to dump on fans. Especially with such short notice.
I consider myself a decently big Bruce fan- I've seen him in concert 14 times and got to see him on Broadway, but I am nowhere near as knowledgeable or have as many years of following The Boss under my belt as somebody like Kirk. So don't kill me for being wrong on this, but I've felt that the "white whale" for diehard Springsteen fans has always been the rumored full band recordings of the Nebraska album that Springsteen and The E Street Band allegedly recorded back in 1981.
Springsteen ended up releasing the album with only his solo recordings, and it ended up being, what many consider, his greatest and most raw material of his career.
Springsteen famously recorded the album on a 4track recorder in his freaking bedroom, strumming an acoustic guitar. So the sound is as gritty and unpolished as the working class life he sings about on it.
The movie that Jeremy Allen White is currently filming about Springsteen centers around him making Nebraska so it's not far fetched to think that some of those fabled demos make it on the movie's soundtrack.
If some of them are going to be released, then why not send all us fans over the moon and give us them all?
So heavy bets are on that being the case but that's only ten tracks so even if that is the case, that means we're still geting FIFTY SIX more records on top of that.
The haters are saying that when Springsteen sold his entire music catalog to Sony, back in 2021 for half a BILLION dollars- part of that deal was to release material that Sony could make bank on. Not just new albums, but classic recordings that had never seen the light of day.
Is that the case here? I'm not saying it is, and I'm not saying it isn't.
What I am saying is we are getting 4-6 full albums worth of never before heard Bruce Springsteen material tomorrow - out of seemingly nowhere. And that is fucking awesome news.
P.s. - had to get Superfan Kirk’s take on this news-
