Bruce Springsteen Is Planning a Second ‘Tracks’ Box Set
Among the projects Bruce Springsteen has in the pipeline is a second volume of Tracks, his 1998 four-CD box set of unreleased songs and B-sides.
“There’s a lot of really good music left,” Springsteen told Rolling Stone. As he's done with some of his archival releases, Springsteen isn't just giving the material a modern mastering, but he's overdubbing some as well. “You just go back there. It’s not that hard. If I pull out something from 1980, or 1985 or 1970, it’s amazing how you can slip into that voice. It’s just sort of a headspace. All of those voices remain available to me, if I want to go to them.”
E Street Band drummer Max Weinberg added that he's recorded new parts for more than 40 songs over the past three years. “Any other artist would kill to get these songs," he said.
It was Springsteen's work on the project that led him to rediscover three tracks - "Janey Needs a Shooter," "If I Was the Priest" and "Song for Orphans" - that will appear on his upcoming album Letter to You. He noted he “sort of came across these songs” and chose to re-record them because he wanted “to be able to go back and sing in your adult voice but with ideas of your youth. … It was kind of insane fun, because the lyrics for all those songs were so completely crazy.”
Springsteen hasn't figured out yet how he plans to release this material. He hinted at packaging some of the songs as "lost albums," which could suggest releases like the "Electric Nebraska" sessions that have never even surfaced on bootlegs. In addition to Tracks, Springsteen has previously opened his vaults for retrospective box sets dedicated to Darkness on the Edge of Town and The River. He also unearthed several songs from earlier in the 21st century for 2014's High Hopes.
On top of all this, there's another album of new material sitting around stemming from a huge batch of songs he wrote at the top of the decade that's already yielded 2012’s Wrecking Ball and last year's Western Stars. Though Springsteen didn't provide any details, he said another LP is “in the can."