ALBUM REVIEW

Is Springsteen’s Tracks 2 Really A Set of Lost Albums?

Or is it a collection of rejected outtakes?

Image by Pete Linforth from Pixabay

Springsteen has previously released collections of outtakes: Tracks I, The Ties That Bind: The River Collection, and The Promise. Those collections gave us around 120 tracks that Springsteen had left off his albums.

He didn’t reject the songs because they were the worst tracks, but because they didn’t fit thematically and artistically with the albums. Many songs on these outtake albums were often individually better than those he selected.

His latest ‘outtakes’ compilation, Tracks II: The Lost Albums, is a different proposition. The 82 songs are not outtakes but songs that go together thematically as seven distinct albums he chose not to release. Springsteen said he never released them before because “they didn’t feel essential to him.”

So, is Tracks II another of his money-making projects by dredging the vaults for rejected material, or is it an essential part of his discography and journey, like the previous three outtake sets?

The previous outtake compilations

The Tracks I set filled in a lot of gaps for Springsteen fanatics, providing not only early demos but several astonishing…