Bruce Springsteen confirmed he was preparing a box set of five previously-unreleased albums, mainly recorded during the ’90s.
In a new interview with Rolling Stone he added detail to comments he’d previously made, saying the collection would follow the spirit of Tracks, his 1998 set of unheard and alternative songs.
“I have a box set of five unreleased albums that are basically post-1988,” Springsteen said. “People have always wondered…People look at my work in the ’90s and they go, ‘The ’90s wasn’t a great decade for Bruce. He was kind of doing this and he wasn’t in the E Street Band…’ I actually made a lot of music during that period of time. I actually made albums. For one reason or another, the timing wasn’t right or whatever; I didn’t put them out.”
He added that he’d assembled the collection after spending a recent winter “completely cleaning out the vault,” and continued: “Some of it is older stuff that the band plays on, and some of it is newer stuff where I was conceptualizing during that period of time. It’ll give people a chance to reassess what I was doing during that time period. Also, a lot of the stuff is really weird…I can’t wait to see the response to some of it.”
Springsteen confirmed a long-standing rumor that one of his unheard albums is entirely based on drum looping. “That’s going to be as weird as people think it’s going to be,” he said. “But it uses all drum loops and things like that, and it uses synthesizers. I like the record myself. But the first thing we’re putting out is a series of albums. It’s going to be so interesting to see the fan response because I love them all.”
He reported that the box set would arrive “in the near future,” and also revealed he was well on the way to completing the follow-up to his latest LP Only the Strong Survive, which is subtitled Covers Vol. 1. “Volume 2, I would say, is probably three-quarters recorded,” he said. “It’s very similar. I continued working in soul music because I was just having so much fun. But I thought of doing a series of these records in a variety of different genres with songs that I love.”
He continued: “I would love to do one record of country music. I would love to do a rock record. There’s just so many different things, and all focused around my voice, all focused around how well I’m singing. I’d really like to use this time when I’m not writing to really focus on my vocals.”
Bruce Springsteen Albums Ranked
Because he spent so many of his formative years painstakingly crafting his albums, we don’t often think of Bruce Springsteen as a prolific artist. But he’s averaged an album nearly every other year throughout his career.