Bruce Springsteen digs into the vault to rewrite his ‘lost’ 1990s

WASHINGTON: 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 long-time 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 organised 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 Bruce Springsteen, who was said to be struggling to find a solo identity during his hiatus from the E Street Band.

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 synthesisers 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.

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.

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So far, however, “Tracks II” has been received favourably by many reviewers.

“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.