Bruce Springsteen has been in the news a lot lately. He incurred the wrath of Donald Trump. He played with Paul McCartney in Liverpool. He performed with Smokey Robinson right before the sexual assault lawsuits against Robinson hit. While all this has been happening, Springsteen has also continued with the rollout to his upcoming box set Tracks II: The Lost Albums, a collection of seven complete but unreleased LPs that will arrive in a couple of weeks. We've already heard tastes of many of those albums in the early singles "Rain In The River," "Blind Spot," "Faithless," "Repo Man," and "Adelita." Today, we get to hear another one that presents Springsteen in a very different light.
One of the lost albums included in the Tracks II set is Twilight Hours, which Bruce Springsteen wrote and recorded around the same time that he was making the 2019 LP Western Stars. Where Western Stars drew inspiration from the California pop of the '60s and '70s, Twilight Hours offers Springsteen's take on the softer, more jazzy parts of the great American songbook. I'm not sure I've ever heard Springsteen in that mode before. Plenty of stars of his vintage have recorded their own standards collections, but that's not what Springsteen does here. Instead, he writes his own songs within that tradition.
Twilight Hours has contributions from the E Street Band's Max Weinberg, Patti Scialfa, and Soozie Tyrell. and also from producer Ron Aniello. In a press release, Springsteen says, "At one time it was either a double record [with Western Stars] or they were part of the same record. I love Burt Bacharach, and I love those kinds of songs and those kinds of songwriters. I took a swing at it because the chordal structures and everything are much more complicated, which was fun for me to pull off. All this stuff could have come right off of those '60s albums." The mellow, ruminative track "Sunday Love" might not immediately become your favorite Bruce Springsteen track, but it's interesting to hear him try something. Listen below.
Tracks II: The Lost Albums is out 6/27 on Sony Music.
