Bruce Springsteen Reveals His Paths Not Taken
'The past always weighs heavy on me,' Bruce Springsteen said on an April afternoon, sitting in the anteroom attached to Thrill Hill, his home studio in New Jersey, where he can make music at any time. 'Our pasts have a lot to do with shaping who we are now and the things we're pursuing. So that is a theme that constantly recurs to me, and I'm always rewriting it, trying to get it right.'
Next Friday, Springsteen will unveil a huge, almost entirely unknown trove of songs from his past on 'Tracks II: The Lost Albums.' They reveal musical paths — mostly pensive, occasionally rowdy — that he briefly explored but chose to set aside. Unlike his 1998 collection 'Tracks,' a set of demos, alternate versions and unreleased songs dating back to the 1970s, 'Tracks II,' with 83 songs, 74 of them previously unreleased in any form, is organized as seven distinct albums.
Springsteen grew up in the era of vinyl LPs, not playlists that can be shuffled. For him an album is 'a cohesive group of songs, basically, that end up being greater than the sum of their parts,' he said. 'They resonate off of one another, creating altered meanings and meanings in reflection with the other songs.'
A record, he added, 'is exactly what it says it is. It is a record of who you are and where you were at that moment in your life. These were actual albums that were of a piece, of a moment, of a genre — that fell together, often while working on other albums.'
As he's been preparing this extensive look back, the 75-year-old musician, well aware of his longtime role as a symbol of America, has also been confronting the political present.
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Do you love all things TV and movies? Subscribe to the Screen Time newsletter to get your weekly dose of what to watch next and what everyone is flailing over from someone who watches everything! We have another biopic about a famous musician coming, and this time it's about Bruce Springsteen. Springsteen, nicknamed "the Boss," is considered one of the most influential musicians in American rock. His career has spanned six decades, with a majority of his albums featuring the iconic E Street Band. After releasing his first two albums, he achieved worldwide popularity with Born to Run in 1975, and then again with Born in the U.S.A. in 1984. Springsteen has won 20 Grammy Awards, two Golden Globes, an Academy Award, and a Special Tony Award. He's also been inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1999. 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Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere hits theaters on October 24. Do you love all things TV and movies? Subscribe to the Screen Time newsletter to get your weekly dose of what to watch next and what everyone is flailing over from someone who watches everything!
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