Sony Schallplatten & CDs

Review: Bruce Springsteen has been sitting on these recordings for years—whole records, not sketches—some finished, some forgotten. Now they finally surface, spanning 1983 to 2018, and offer a different kind of self-portrait: one less polished, more exploratory. The earliest material finds him navigating a path between the haunted quiet of ‘Nebraska’ and the radio gloss of ‘Born in the U.S.A.’. Later sessions toy with drum loops, synth beds and orchestral swells. One batch plays like the soundtrack to a film that never existed; another leans into pedal steel and modest country sketches. There are borderland narratives, noir-ish ballads, E Street-style anthems. That New Jersey grit—that plainspoken clarity he’s carried since the boardwalk days—runs through even the softest tracks. He says he made this music to please himself and close friends, and you hear that freedom in its variety: some songs feel raw and just-found, others fully formed. There’s no tidy arc, but that’s part of its charm. Across seven discs and 82 songs, what emerges isn’t a legacy project but something quieter: a window into how a working musician keeps working. You don’t come away with answers—only a better sense of how far Springsteen will follow a song just to see where it leads.