Tom Dunne: Bruce Springsteen gives us an early Christmas gift
Bruce Springsteen has released an impressive box set, Tracks II: The Lost Albums. (AP Photo/Matt Rourke, File)
July may seem a little early to be wishing you a Happy Christmas, but if you’re Springsteen fan I can’t think of what else to say. The Boss got you something amazing this year and just couldn’t wait ‘til December to give it to you. And you won’t be asking for a gift receipt either.
It’s timely too in the run up to July 4, Independence Day and all that. I can’t remember a time when celebrating that great nation’s big day has seemed more fraught with difficulty. But this gift from Bruce helps enormously.
The problem with the antics of the current US administration is that America is not just the biggest military power in history - although it certainly is that, and seeing the “world’s cop” suddenly seeking back-handers is hard to take – but it is also, to many, a kind of Utopia.
It has been, for centuries, a place to escape to, a refuge, a romantic ideal. It is the ultimate destination for, well, us tired, poor, huddled masses. Great writers have evoked that – Steinbeck, O’Connor, Faulkner – but few have brought it into our lives, with such power as Bruce.
And now here are seven more entire volumes. Not individual, previously unheard tracks, but entire unreleased projects, spanning the years 1983 to 2019 and presented with stunning sleeve notes and Bruce’s insights. If it was a Christmas gift, you’d be taking January off.
Amongst its highlights...
Springsteen was in a critical and commercial lull in the early 1990s when the song he wrote for the film won an Oscar for Best Song. Buoyed by this he resolved to write songs using the same template, namely drum loops and synths.
The result was what has been described as “scenes from a mid-life crisis.” It is probably one of the strongest albums in the seven-album set, so why was it not put out as it was fully mixed and scheduled for a mid 1995 release?
Bruce says that he had just released three albums in a row about romantic relationships and felt a fourth was just too much. Instead, the record company went with a Greatest Hits package which was significant in both positioning him in the mid 90s and reconciling him with the E Street Band.
An early version of which featured on that hits album is included here.
The most intriguing of the seven albums as it was “commissioned” for a film that was never released. It does beg the question, who commissions Bruce Springsteen and doesn’t release the film? Surely if you have a Bruce soundtrack you’d just commission a new film?
Springsteen wrote these in the early 2000s when on a trip to Florida to visit his daughter and his children feature on one track. Is it throwaway? No, of course not. is as beautiful a love song as you will hear this year. The film was to be a “spiritual Western”. Is it too late to make it now?
This album was made simultaneously with That material was quite down so in the afternoons they would kick back and have fun. The title track later appeared on the superb 2019 release
There is a gorgeous cover of Johnny Rivers’ and A countrified version of the sublime B-side, At a pivotal time in his career – his first acoustic album since Nebraska – this was seen as too light-hearted to be released.
Oh, to have something as light-hearted and unreleased in my back catalogue.
After that there are too many highlights to list but one, a companion piece Twilight Hours, to the album on which he celebrated the song writing of Jimmy Webb, Burt Bacharach and Hal David, will be, to many, worth the price of admission alone.
Regarding that price, the vinyl box set is €320, delivery included. That’s, ahem, €29 per slice of vinyl, he said as if explaining the purchase to his wife, or €45 per lost album. But that doesn’t take into account Erik Flannigan’s insightful and wonderful notes, contained in a hardback book!
A small price to pay, no one has ever argued, for an item described in one paper as “surely the greatest box set of all time”.
I will be in my man shed until further notice.
