Springsteen country ("Lost Albums" pt 2)

Honky tonk w/ pedal steel. Mexicali ballads w/ mariachi. "Tracks II: The Lost Albums" shows Springsteen's American music — and notably, his immigrant tales — are even deeper than we knew.

*This series began with Springsteen at 75 and The Lost Albums unpacked (pt 1), and concludes with Bruce’s “Lost Albums” pt 3.

One of Bruce Springsteen’s great hat tricks has been embodying American music’s multitudes. Rock’n’roll in its early iterations, r&b, soul, gospel, jazz — all styles that contain multi-cultural multitudes themselves.

I was surprised when he leaned into more folk-style music with Nebraska and The Seeger Sessions. But I shouldn’t have been. I first interviewed Springsteen — down on the Asbury Park boardwalk, fittingly — while reporting a story for the New York Times on the Seeger Sessions back in 2006, before seeing him that year, post-Katrina, at the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival, where he fit right in. It was illuminating to hear him talk about his connection to folk music, one he shared with many of his peers (see Lou Reed’s Words + Music, May 1965).

“Country music” may seem further outside Springsteen’s wheelhouse. But of course it’s part of rock’n’roll’s DNA, and a melting pot in the same way — Jimmy Rodgers playing the blues, Bob Wills jazzing those blues, etc. In fact, as a nation raised on “Born To Run” and Born in the U.S.A. came of age, it made sense that country music would begin reflecting Springsteen. And it hasn’t stopped.

Springsteen was raised in suburban-urban Freehold, New Jersey, a state with a lot of farm communities and rural culture. His own dip into “country”-ish music arguably began with Nebraska, an album of songs satisfyingly mirrored back over the years in some very country ways.

Tracks II: The Lost Albums show Bruce going far deeper into country-western and country-adjacent tradition than his official albums have, and they’re glimpses of roads not taken. Dude never had a proper country hit himself. But he might well have. And the genre could’ve arguably benefitted from his voice. Below — with a bunch of bootleg links and notes — I unpack the set’s three most country-flavored albums, which as a body of work, by my measure, is the best stuff in the box.