9. Tracks (1998)

In an otherwise musically uneventful decade for Bruce fans, the end of the ’90s saw the release of Tracks. Long known for writing way too many songs for any given album, Bruce had by then accrued something like 350 unreleased tracks in varying states of completion, as estimated by his longtime engineer Toby Scott. Sifting through all of it, they came up with the 66 songs that wound up comprising Tracks, aiming to sketch out the alternative history of his career. The final product was a mixture of B-sides from old singles, demos, songs that had previously only been heard live, songs that had been mentioned but never released, and some that had been, until this point, entirely unknown.

Given that it’s made up primarily of Human Touch outtakes (yeah, the stuff that didn’t make Human Touch), the fourth disc is pretty dispensable. The rest of Tracks, however, is essential listening. Unlike the focus of The Promise, which had an extra “What if?” factor of feeling like a standalone album, Tracks is a wide-ranging, overwhelming listen, less so for any curiosity factor (like “If they had put this on The River rather than …”) than for the sheer amount of amazing material that was never heard simply because it didn’t fit quite right on the albums. It starts out slow, with some early solo performance tracks and then a smattering of early ’70s outtakes like “Thundercrack” (long a fan favorite at shows) and “Zero And Blind Terry.” Things get really crazy on Discs 2 and 3 when you realize there were essentially enough songs to have (multiple) entirely different versions of The River and Born In The U.S.A., and, most preposterously, you can picture how they’d still be classic albums.

That likely sounds hyperbolic, but I don’t think it really is. Oddly, Tracks was one of the main releases that I first listened to when getting into Springsteen. To me, the infectious jangle of “Take ‘Em As They Come,” one of the great overlooked Bruce tracks, trumps almost anything that actually did make The River; the charge of “My Love Will Not Let You Down” blows right past Born In The U.S.A. material like “No Surrender.” Those are just my personal, peculiar obsessions, but any given fan could list “This Hard Land,” or “Janey Don’t You Lose Heart,” or “Don’t Look Back,” or “Loose Ends,” or “Shut Out the Light,” or “Rockaway The Days,” or … you get the point. There’s a ridiculous wealth of material to dig into here, stuff I’d immediately recommend to a new fan sooner than half the albums Bruce has put out. It might be a bonus round, but like The Promise it deepens not only the narrative of Bruce’s career, but also your appreciation for just how damn good of a songwriter the guy is. If any fanbase deserves an embarrassment of riches like this, it would have to be Bruce’s.