Billboard Women in Music 2025
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.
Springsteen, who will be on tour this summer, teased earlier in the week that something would be coming, and his fan network immediately sprung into action, some not only accurately guessing what the project is, but also what might be on it.
Not surprisingly, the most popular guess was the full-band version of his “Nebraska” album, which Springsteen recorded and abandoned in 1981 and ’82, electing instead to release his demos, as he felt they had a spirit and rawness that the band didn’t or couldn’t capture. With the biopic of the making of that album — “Deliver Me From Nowhere,” starring Jeremy Allen White — slated for release later this year, it seems likely that at least some of those songs will be on the collection.
Springsteen has released multiple archival collections since the first “Tracks” dropped nearly 27 years ago, including expanded anniversary editions of his classic albums “Born to Run,” “Darkness on the Edge of Town” and “The River,” as well as dozens of live recordings available on his website.
The first volume of “Tracks” spanned 1972-1995 but featured just five post-1990 recordings, so it seems likely that the bulk of the material from this new edition will be from the past 30 years. However, Vol. 1 featured just one “Nebraska” outtake, a glaring omission that has tantalized fans for decades.
Springsteen told Variety in 2017, “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.”
