Earlier this week, Bruce Springsteen‘s public relations team sent out a press release that summed up the major events of the year. It focused on the continuation of his Letter To You world tour, including his triumphant Sea.Hear.Now headlining set in Asbury Park, New Jersey, the acclaimed documentary Road Diary: Bruce Springsteen and The E Street Band, and a 40th anniversary Born In The U.S.A. vinyl package.
It ends with a very tantalizing sentence: “Upcoming releases in 2025 will include a look back at Springsteen’s storied recording career, featuring never-before-heard material.”
They didn’t elaborate, but it’s quite possible they are referencing a box set that fans have been informally calling Tracks 2 for the last decade. The original Tracks arrived in 1998 and was packed with unheard material from the first quarter century of Springsteen’s career. But the Bruce vault is a very large place, and there’s still a giant collection of recordings that nobody has ever heard, even on bootlegs.
We first asked Springsteen about the Tracks 2 rumors back in 2014. “There’s just a lot of things,” he said. “I kinda keep all these things wide open. I’m in search of the context for different things to be released, and what feels right, timing-wise. What feels like it’ll be interesting to your fans at a certain moment, or what feels like you need to do at a particular time. Or it’s just interesting to you.”
In other words, he wasn’t ready to reveal much. When we tried again in 2022, however, he got a lot more specific. “I have a box set of five unreleased albums that are basically post-1988,” he said. “People have always wondered…People look at my work in the Nineties, and they go, ‘The Nineties wasn’t a great decade for Bruce. He was kind of doing this, and he wasn’t in the E Street Band…’ I actually made a lot of music during that period of time. I actually made albums. For one reason or another, the timing wasn’t right or whatever, I didn’t put them out.”
“They’ve kind of gathered,” he continued. “I spent time over one of the past winters completely cleaning out the vault. I have a series of Tracks albums that eventually we’ll release. Some of it is older stuff that the band plays on, and some of it is newer stuff where I was conceptualizing during that period of time. It’ll give people a chance to reassess what I was doing during that time period. Also, a lot of the stuff is really weird. There’s going to be people that really…I can’t wait to see the response to some of it [laughs].”
The prospect of five completely unreleased albums from the period after Tunnel of Love is very tantalizing. One of them is the “drum loop” album that he created around the time of “Streets of Philadelphia” in 1993. “That’s going to be as weird as people think it’s going to be,” Springsteen told us in 2022. “But it uses all drum loops and things like that, and it uses synthesizers.” (We got a taste of the album in 1995 when Springsteen gave the song “Missing” to the Sean Penn/Jack Nicholson box office dud The Crossing Guard.)
Less is known about the other four albums, but Springsteen has said over the years that he cut an album of “relationship” songs with his 1992/93 touring band that was shelved. It likely included “Back in Your Arms” and “Secret Garden,” which he wound up cutting with the E Street Band for the 1995 Greatest Hits package. They appear to be the same album.
He’s also spoken about a “western swing” album recorded around the time of The Ghost of Tom Joad. If Tracks 2 is finally arriving next year, it should surface as well. But this thing has become the Chinese Democracy of box sets. We’ll believe the lost drum loop album and these others are coming when we’re holding the box in our hands.
Back in 2022, Springsteen also said he was two-thirds of the way done with a sequel to his soul covers records Only the Strong Survive. “It’s very similar [to the first one],” he said. “I continued working in soul music because I was just having so much fun. But I thought of doing a series of these records in a variety of different genres with songs that I love. That’s because, in the moment, I’m not writing. I might not write in a while…I would love to do country music. I would love to do one record of country music. I would love to do a rock record. There’s just so many different things, and all focused around my voice, all focused around how well I’m singing. I’d really like to use this time when I’m not writing to really focus on my vocals.”
At this point, we have no idea if the second Only the Strong Survive record will ever come or if we’ll have to wait until Tracks 3 in 2038 to hear it. We do know he has a completely blank calendar until he returns to Europe in May for another string of stadium shows with the E Street Band. They run through early July.
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