The Boss is back in towns. Bruce Springsteen and his E Street Band returned to the road earlier last month for their only as-of-yet scheduled shows this year, bringing what has been re-dubbed the grand Land of Hope & Dreams Tour to more than half a million fans in six countries throughout summer, after being forced to cut short their European leg due to illness last year. Beginning with a three-show run in mighty Manchester, UK, these re-scheduled dates serve as the culminating finale to the two-year-long run of what were Springsteen and co’s first live performances in almost seven years. And while an E Street Band roadtrip is always sure to turn a fair amount of industry heads, particularly when your ringleader is 75, this latest one managed to garner an extra notch of attention thanks to some inadvertent promo from none other than the sitting President of the United States.

During his tour opener, on 14th May, Springsteen let out a few less-than-flattering speeches about the current executive branch governing his home country. In response, US President Donald Trump posted an unhinged statement going at the Boss’s appearance and intelligence, while also demanding an investigation into former Presidential candidate Kamala Harris’s endorsements that came from Springsteen himself, as well as a slew of other A-list celebrities. Not even a full week later, the New Jersey success story saw fit to release a whole brand new live EP—conveniently titled Land of Hope & Dreams—taped at that momentous Manchester tour opener. And yes, he included those ad libs. As the good people over at Apple Music put it: no shade to the four defiant songs captured during the gig, but this may well be the first live record surprise-dropped for its stage banter.

We might’ve buried the lead though. For the real kicker this #BruceSummer have got to be the seven previously-unheard studio full lengths dropping for the first time tomorrow, Friday 27th June. The widely-rumored, long-anticipated Tracks II: The Lost Albums—a spiritual successor to the 1998 cult four-disc Tracks collection that has become the ultimate non-studio album fan favorite over the years—is a gargantuan set spanning 83 songs (74 of which never-before-heard). Conspicuously filling in essential chapters of Springsteen’s expansive timeline, Tracks II arrives in limited-edition nine LP, seven CD, as well as all the obligatory digital formats—including custom packaging for each of the seven records-in-record, with a 100-page cloth-bound, hardcover book featuring rare archival photos, liner notes from essayist Erik Flannigan, and a personal introduction on the project from the Boss himself. A more digestible and chart-friendly companion bundle—Lost And Found: Selections from The Lost Albums—will instead feature twenty highlights from across the full tracklist, also out the same day on two LPs or one CD.

Upping the overall B-sides count by a generous 17 offerings, compared to the 66 off the first Tracks instalment, Tracks II maps a creative trajectory that includes writing sessions ranging from 1983 to 2018. For the project, Springsteen and longtime producer/multi-instrumentalist sideman Ron Aniello polished the sound quality and sparsely added instrumental enrichments here and there to the old tapes. The bulk of the material does stem from the Boss working as a one-man studio band, as he has since the 1980s. The umbrella front cover for the vault collection—linked at the end of this piece—lets us deduce that the top-to-bottom chronological order in which the seven projects are listed should refer to their gestation period over the projected 35-year range (i.e. with LA Garage Sessions ’83 being the oldest, and Perfect World the one compiled in 2018). As of the time of this writing, just mere hours away from the big reveal, Columbia Records and the Springsteen camp have been unleashing six standalone teasers from as many distinct discs within the coveted assemblage, with the inaugural LA Garage Sessions ’83 LP remaining the only one without advance listening (safe for an elusive low-fidelity 20-second teaser on the box set’s splash website).

Things kicked off early into April, along with the first project reveal, when a debut look at the series came in the form of “Rain in the River“, a blistering and expansive Perfect World cut that aptly encapsulates that project’s arena-ready E Street blend. Halfway through that same month, the synth-heavy and drum machine-programmed “Blind Spot” was served to quench the longstanding thirsts of all those salivating over Springsteen’s allegedly mythical ‘hip-hop influenced loops record’—ours included. As it turns out, that collection of ten numbers has now been billed as the Streets of Philadelphia Sessions, perhaps the most highly-anticipated of the seven LPs, if you ask us. Curiously enough, the previously available “Missing“—from The Crossing Guard OST—remains true to its title and does not in fact appear on the tracklist of what would’ve felt like its perfect home album.

Meanwhile, on the 1st May, the The Lost Albums roll out added another notch to its cowboy belt, by completely switching up the mood: “Faithless“, the titular song of the 11-track third disc in the catalog, is a reserved, husky, and unplugged country Western affair. Not the most immediate and ear-catching jam in the Springsteen lore—particularly considering his accomplished foray into the genre on 2019’s Western Stars—but one that rewards patience and repeated listens by way of a more focused TLC. This collection of songs was actually initially meant to soundtrack a ‘spiritual Western’ motion picture based on an unidentified book, started in 2005. Springsteen wrote and recorded the music all by himself in a matter of weeks, building on a foundation of spiritual piano and bluesy slide guitar—twenty years later, the film is reportedly still ‘in development’. Somewhere North of Nashville‘s “Repo Man“, released two weeks later on 14th May, pulls another 180° on the promotional roll out sonics, with its lively, saloon-y, and galloping blues-country flairs, couched in an infectious immediacy that is poised to make it a catchy live staple (tall order, we know!).

A couple weeks after that, Mexican ranchera-disc 5 Inyo‘s unplugged preview came through in the shape of “Adelita“, a soft and gentle ode to Mexico’s ‘soldaderas’—women who played a major role in the country’s fight for independence. Lastly, but not least of the advance pack, this past 12th June the Boss unwrapped the subdued piano-jazz brushed “Sunday Love“, a final teaser off the Western Stars-cutting room floor exhumed retro-pop affair Twilight Hours. The major 7th chords-record is a collection presenting a window into the ‘what-if’ the 2019 country folk outing were a double album instead, offering the New Jerseyan’s take on a softer, more jazzy revisitation of the storied American songbook. In a recent press release about the tune, Springsteen says, “I love Burt Bacharach, and I love those kinds of songs and those kinds of songwriters. I took a swing at it because the chordal structures and everything are much more complicated, which was fun for me to pull off. All this stuff could have come right off of those ’60s albums.” Sure, but it also still sounds a lot like Springsteen, and like a cut that wouldn’t have been too out of place on 2002’s The Rising.

In summation, over the course of almost three full months of promo we’ve been fed with six previously unreleased Bruce Springsteen rarities, amounting to about 23 minutes of new material. Tracks II is 83 songs long, and a quick inferential stunt on account of this initial sample suggests we could expect something in the region of 320 minutes (or more than five hours!) of runtime. That’s an inordinate amount of never-heard-before music to sift through, let alone for somebody with 21 studio albums already in the catalog. It’s a barrage of music that would put whole careers’s worth of tracks by average artists today to shame. All (re-)released on one day. We’re no doubt living in times of Springsteen abundance—and we have no complaints over that. Oh, and didn’t we mention last month’s live EP that was basically taped and released overnight?

In case you were wondering, we’re going to catch Bruce and his E Street Band live in a matter of days in Milan, Italy, as part of one of those rescheduled tour dates from last year. The chances of hearing a cut off Tracks II performed live when you have a cherished catalog of almost 400 to pull from are slimmer than your average American’s budget left at the end of the month, but hey we’ll keep you posted in case he does. As a consolation, we’ll have seven new studio LPs to savor wall-to-wall as early as tomorrow morning. Speaking of which, here’s how we’d rank them in order of anticipation and excitement, before hearing any more of the whole thing:

1. Streets of Philadelphia Sessions
2. LA Garage Sessions ’83
3. Perfect World
4. Twilight Hours
5. Somewhere North of Nashville
6. Faithless
7. Inyo

No empirical rhyme or reason over this; just gauging the enjoyment the various teasers have been providing hitherto, and knowing Bruce Springsteen a little bit. Yet, clearly not enough to predict what happened next. In a recent video deep-dive into the genesis and design of Tracks II, the 75-year old New Jersey native came through with a cold-blooded twist right at the end: there exists a Tracks III collection. And it’s apparently already finished. He went on to explain that ‘[Tracks III] is basically what was left in the vault‘, including outtakes from as far back as his 1973 debut, Greetings From Asbury Park, N.J. and as recent as last year: ‘so there was a lot of good music left. There are five full albums of music‘. It might just be true that all good things come in threes, after all.

Streets of Philadelphia Sessions

“Sometimes if you lock into one song you like then you follow that thread. I had this song ‘Blind Spot,’ and I followed that thread through the rest of the record.” — BS

Faithless

“Faithless was a piece of work I took (on commission) for a spiritual Western film that was preparing to be made around 2004. In Hollywood, I have found, you can disappear into “development” for long periods of time so I thought I would release these now and let you hear my results of this interesting project.” — BS

Somewhere North of Nashville

“I wrote all these country songs at the same time I wrote ‘The Ghost of Tom Joad.’ Those sessions completely overlap each other. I’m singing ‘Repo Man’ in the afternoon and ‘The Line’ at night. So the country record got made right along with ‘The Ghost of Tom Joad.’ Very similar to ‘Born in the U.S.A.’ and ‘Nebraska’” — BS

Inyo

“‘Inyo’ was a record I wrote in California during long drives along the California aqueduct, up through Inyo County on my way to Yosemite or Death Valley. It’s one of my favorites.” — BS

Twilight Hours

“At one time, it was either a double record or they were part of the same record. But I separated the ‘Western Stars’ material out and what I had left is ‘Twilight Hours.'” — BS

Perfect World

“‘Perfect World’…is a record I pieced together from work I had held for this project…I wanted just a little fun, noise, and rock ‘n’ roll to finish the package.” — BS

We’d like to thank you sincerely for taking the time to read this and we hope to feel your interest again next time.

AV