The parallel universe of the boss: what the “lost albums” tell

“Springsteen Station”: the detail is apparently marginal, it appears for a few seconds in the parallel universe of the TV series Fringe by JJ Abrams, the Creator of Lost. The protagonist travels between our world and another, the same almost in everything, but where history has taken a different way, and in New Jersey there is a train station dedicated to the boss. Who knows what happened in that other world to his music and his career.
And who knows cOSA would have happened if Bruce Springsteen had really published all the music contained in “Tracks II – The Lost Albums”. What kind of career, of imagination, of collective perception would we have of its path today? It would be different, perhaps even radically, if he had crossed one of those Sliding Doors – Which today all present themselves together in this album, to tell us a parallel universe of the music of one of the greatest rock artists.

The box of Lost Albums It presents itself as a constellation of discs remained for unpublished years: Completed projects, aborted, set aside or reassembled during over forty years of career. They tell a parallel universebut also An alternative story but consistent with the image we have of Springsteen. An artist with an enormous creative impulse, who writes and engraves very much. A look that the fans already knew before but only through the hole of the bootleg lock.

In these parallel universes and in these career phases, It is always the same Springsteen. A spontaneous, instinctive, sincere artist, but also that has a maniacal, almost obsessive cure in his choices. The same goes for his study music, often the result of unstoppable creative impulses, sessions in which two or three discs are engraved simultaneously and in short periods. But the music sees the light only after a study of details, after infinite reflections on the value of the songs and on the effect they can have on fans and on the reputation of Springsteen itself.

Bruce’s story according to Bruce

“I have always published my records with great attention, making sure to tell stories that had their consistency, one after the other,” says Springsteen.
The story that Bruce Springsteen told – to himself and his audience – is that of a self -taught “working class”, grown up in New Jersey, in one HomeTown Small, welcoming but also suffocating, between Catholic churches, bar and a family with a complex father and a mythological mother, against the background of an American dream always present but never accomplished.
A powerful mythology, largely built artfully, like his character “The city from which I come is full of small impostors, and I am not an exception”, he said in his autobiography, admitting that he had spent his life telling the American workers, but also that he has never worked 5 days a week before when he had a theatrical show in replica every day at Broadway.
Springsteen himself confirm ita in the introductory notes ai Lost Albumswhen he admits that he has not published these records because “they did not fit consistently in my creative narrative arc”. His official discography was treated “with great attention”, precisely to “give shape to a clear image in the minds of the fans of who I was and where I was going”. But the Lost Albums reveal that another Springsteen also existed. No less true, only less compatible with the public story.

The parallel universe: seven albums, seven Bruce

THE Lost Albums they build another story, equally consistent: that of Un restless artist, divided, never fully satisfied with his official choices. An artist who, while building an album, records another one, sometimes even two. That while preparing Born in the USArecords a more intimate double disc and close to folk, remaining emotionally more tied to Nebraska. While the lights of the stadiums are turned off, it composes in solitude hypnotic, minimal songs, intended for a film never shot. They are not a simple collection of waste or outttakes, but the testimony of parallel creative paths, often put aside so as not to interfere with the official narrative.
If the canon tells Bruce like Storyteller Of the deep America, of her dreams and disappointments, the box shows us its most experimental, reflective, ironic, sometimes dark side, sometimes pop in an almost provocative way. There is almost a constant desire to escape from the identity that he himself has helped to create.
The story is that of an artist who constantly questions who he is, where he comes from and where he can go. Continuous research, which passes through drifting characters, men on the run from their past, voices that speak from geographical and emotional margins. Consistency is not stylistic, but thematic: Each album tells a tension between the desire for roots and that of evasion, between the need for redemption and the fear of failure. And it is this tension that keeps the seven records together.

The Garage Sessions ’83 It is a suspended bridge between Nebraska And Born in the USA.: a folk-rock disc that shows a Bruce still immersed in the minimalist and dark narrative of the first, but already attempted by a return to the classic song form, with guitars, synths and a band in the background. It is a restless album, which is looking for direction.
In Streets of Philadelphia Sessionswe find the most unsettling Bruce: electronic, lonelyinfluenced by hip-hop and rhythmic loops of the West Coast. It is a creative response to a moment of personal and artistic crisis, where the voice at times is filtered, whispered, almost hidden. But even here, behind the new form, the questions of all time remain: faith, identity, loss.
Faithless was born as a soundtrack for a film never made. Still, it is among the most touching albums: seven songs and four instrumental songs that evoke inner and spiritual landscapes, written by a man only with his guitar and his ghosts. The narrative is that of those who have lost everything and try, without clamor, to find meaning.
With Somewhere North of Nashville Let’s go back to the Country territorybut filtered by a light melancholy, almost mocking. Engraved in the same months of The Ghost of Tom Joadis the bright, ironic, disillusioned side of that season. The songs speak of policemen close to retirement, failed singers, forgotten loves: figures who do not give up but don’t even delude themselves.
Inyo It is instead the most political and narrative album: a map of the border between the United States and Mexico, in which Springsteen confronts migration, violence, memory. It is a real concept album, where each song tells a fragment of that modern epic. There is the soldierthe gardener, the boy Hopi, the trafficker, the tired policeman: it is the Springsteen who observes and tells without judging, like an empathic reporter.
Twilight Hours shows us a different bruce: romantic, orchestral, refined. A melancholy Crooner at Bacharach, the Orbison. The songs speak of love, loss, tenderness, in an unpublished but not inconsistent style. It is the adult voice of those who accept their fragility, and put it in music.
In the end, Perfect World It is the least compact disc, but the most RocK. A collection of songs written in different eras, linked by the thin wire of the desire to play. There are energetic pieces written with Joe Grushecky, Gospel ballads, folk songs. The tone is disordered, but sincere. It is Bruce who looks back without constructions, who leaves room for every voice, even to those he did not know where to place.

Together, these seven Lost Albums They tell a more multifaceted and profound artist than the official discography could show. They do not contradict the narrative we know: it expands it, complicating it, humanize it. I am The hidden chapters of a story we believed we knew.

Bruce’s voice is also made of silences

Lost Albums tells us that Bruce Springsteen is un artist who built his voice not only with what he published, but also with what he chose to keep hidden. The silencesthe archives, the second versions, the forgotten songs are not “waste”, but they are traces of a wider, complex and stratified musical thought.
An artist is also what he does not publish.

Bruce, as in the scene of Fringehas always lived between two universes: that of the songs we know and that of those that, for decades, has kept aside. Now that we can listen to them, we also understand the silence better.