Springsteen digs into the vault to rewrite his 'lost' '90s

Conventional wisdom among Bruce Springsteen fans holds that the 1990s were his "lost" decade -- a period where he struggled to chart a new course after parting ways with his longtime collaborators, the E Street Band.

It turns out "The Boss" never bought into that narrative, and now he's aiming to overturn it with a new collection of unreleased material, "Tracks II: The Lost Albums," released on Friday.

"I often read about myself in the '90s as having some lost period," the 75-year-old rocker said in a 17-minute documentary released last week.

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"Actually, Patti and I were parenting very young children at the time, so that affected some of your workout," he conceded, referencing his wife and E Street Band member, Patti Scialfa.

"But really, I was working the whole time."

During the Covid pandemic, Springsteen returned to his archives and "finished everything I had in my vault."

The result is a sprawling box set compilation of 83 songs organized thematically into seven albums, spanning his output from 1983 to 2018.

But the greatest spotlight falls on the 1990s -- a decade long seen as a wilderness period for the New Jersey native, who was said to be struggling to find a solo identity during his hiatus from the E Street Band.

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Springsteen first burst onto the national scene in the '70s as a would-be heir to Bob Dylan, hit new commercial heights in the '80s with "Born in the USA," and delivered what many view as the definitive artistic response to the 9/11 attacks with "The Rising."

One album in the box set revisits the "Streets of Philadelphia Sessions," evoking the namesake hit with a moody blend of synthesizers and pulsing drumbeats as he explores dark emotional terrain.

"I'd made three albums about relationships, I had a fourth one," Springsteen said. "It was particularly dark, and I just didn't know if my audience was going to be able to hear it at that moment."

Another record, "Somewhere North of Nashville," is a rollicking, country-rooted romp. A third, "Inyo," recorded in the late '90s along California's borderlands, is an ode to Mexican-American culture.

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Springsteen is far from the first major artist to unearth new material from songs that were originally shelved, following a tradition established by Dylan's "Bootleg Series" in 1991.

"Tracks II," as the name suggests, is a sequel to 1998's "Tracks" -- and "Tracks III" is set to follow.

Over the years, critics have often argued there's a reason some tracks remain unreleased -- with "new" Beatles songs based on the late John Lennon's homemade demos often cited as proof that not every vault needs to be reopened.

So far, however, "Tracks II" has been received favorably by many reviewers.

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"For any fan, it's a revelation to hear the secret mischief that Bruce Springsteen was making in the shadows, during his most low-profile era -- the music he made for himself, after years of making music for the world," wrote Rob Sheffield in Rolling Stone.

ia/jgc