It’s really hard to figure out the motivation behind this release, a virtual treasure trove of mostly unreleased material-four discs worth-that, I predict, will not sell beyond the Boss’ most devoted fans.
Starting with a handful of his 1972 demos for producer John Hammond, who discovered him and nurtured his early career at Columbia, the songs trace through the times of all of Springsteen’s work, giving us "alternative albums," if you will of material he deemed either inappropriate or not completed enough for inclusion on the commercially released albums.
Frankly, while most of this material is staggering for Bossaholics who have most of it on bootleg cassettes and disks and now can have clean, digital copies, there are very few songs here that really should have replaced anything on any of his records. It seems, notwithstanding how enjoyable many of these "tracks" are, Springsteen made the right choices in leaving them off his releases.
Following the demos, there are at least a couple of ‘albums" themselves within these disks. From "Thundercrack" through "Ricky Wants a Man," there’s the early "song story"Bruce, whose epics told great stories of characters and were never paired down. The second "record" is probably stretched from the material recorded in the late 70s and early 80s, during the "Nebraska" period through a stark, acoustic, rumbling "Born in the USA," which finally shows us what this song is really about. The third "album" comes from the late 80s "Tunnel of Love" period where the breakup of his marriage, his band and his grapple with a public love affair with current wife Patti Scialfa created a bleak landscape for his songs, which were getting tighter and tighter as the year progressed. The final songs, from the "Human Touch/Lucky Town" days in the early 90s are dragged down and flat, much like the commercial releases themselves, by pedestrian playing (read: No E Street Band).
"Tracks" can easily be compared to his life box set from the mid 1980s, in that it’s exhaustive, huge and arguably has some important pieces missing. But, it is a fascinating snapshot of what he was doing, and the choices he made, in the studio over the years.
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