Much like The Ghost of Tom Joad, Inyo is the album from Tracks II: The Lost Albums that, while I liked well enough first, has grown in my estimation with each listen revealing more.

Its similarity to …Joad in that respect shouldn’t be much of a surprise as this continues where that album left off. Glancing back The Bruce Springsteen Timeline, Inyo‘s seat in 1997 puts it a couple of years down the line from that album and a year or two ahead of the reunion tour and 2002’s The Rising. Previously that seven year gap between studio albums felt like a gulf – as though, following the ‘Shut the Fuck Up Tour’ that followed ...Joad, Springsteen looked back with the release of Tracks in ’98 and the eventual reunion the E Street Band rather than creating new material.

However, we know that Bruce seems to have had at least four things on the boil at once in those days. With the ’90s proving just as prolific in terms of writing (if not releases), while touring …Joad across 18 months, Springsteen kept writing with many more songs written in hotel rooms after shows. While we got some of those songs on 2005’s Devils & Dust, it’s on Inyo that these are finally presented as a piece – albeit with the later additions of ‘Adelita’ and ‘The Last Charro’ date from 2010 and the initial accumulation of work for the Western Stars project. This does present an interesting crux – Springsteen’s singing voice and production style of the mid-to-late ’90s was very different to that of the Western Stars era and running material from that era through the Ron Aniello filter / processing creates an odd effect that means quieter songs from the original ‘batch’ like ‘One False Move’ have a very different sound and listening experience to the ‘newer’ material enough to feel like two distinctly different sessions rather than one complete set.

This sits one of the stronger parts of Springsteen’s California Cycle – those early ’90s albums reek of L.A over-production but as he travelled around – on motorbike, in car or tourbus – and became infatuated with Californian culture and its history you feel the search for voices that represent all sides and from both sides of the border.

This, to me, is a fascinating period of Springsteen’s career, this exploration of different themes and voices as he continued his own search for his ‘solo’ voice, a stretch of his career where the music narrowed in sound but widened in scope — fewer characters chasing escape, more people simply trying to endure. Like Joad, then, the songs on Inyo are mostly acoustic and restrained, built around his voice and guitar, but there’s a subtle expansion in texture that sets it apart and adds a delicious flavour. Mariachi-influenced horns, accordion, and violin drift in and out, not as novelty or genre exercise that had overwhelmed Somewhere North of Nashville and will eventually become the focus rather than the songs on later albums, but as atmosphere — a way of grounding these stories in a specific cultural and physical landscape. The arrangements remain sparse, almost severe at times, but they’re carefully shaded, giving the songs a cinematic sense of place without ever tipping into overstatement.

Least: Indian Town

This isn’t necessarily a bad song, there aren’t any on here for me. More that ‘Indian Town’ doesn’t stand out or add as much as the other songs. It feels very much of a piece with Joad and even Nebraska‘s songs and gets a little lost in the memory after listening to the album.

Most: Ciudad Juarez

There are a number of songs on Inyo that could sit as ‘Most’, for me, the closing trilogy in particular is one of the strongest in Springsteen’s catalogue. However, “Ciudad Juarez” is the song on Inyo that completely levels you. It’s a haunting, politically charged ballad, that’s told with such stark clarity that you can hear every word with a directness that makes it so heartbreaking. Springsteen places us in the shoes of a grieving father whose daughter vanishes in the border city, offering no closure, only loss. It’s one of the saddest songs he’s ever recorded, stripped of sentimentality and all the more devastating for it.

The song sits in familiar Nebraska/Ghost of Tom Joad territory but with a distinct, mournful arrangement, punctuated by two tragic trumpet solos that hover like funeral hymns. Beneath Bruce’s restrained delivery is a quiet, seething indictment of the violence and systems that enable it: drugs flowing north, guns flowing south, blood left behind. It’s heartbreaking, enraged, and deeply empathetic—arguably one of Springsteen’s finest and most politically pointed songs and is one of many on this album that make you wonder how the hell it sat in the vaults for so long.

If LA Garage Sessions ’83 was the collection of songs I was most familiar with ahead of Tracks II: The Lost Albums‘ release, then Streets of Philadelphia Sessions was the one I was most looking forward to. Despite there being three albums from the ’90s in the set, this was the most infamous of his ‘lost’ albums and one that had been referenced variously over the years as either his ‘loops’ or ‘hip-hop’ album as all that was known was that it utilised the same drum-machine and loop approach as his ’94 single ‘Streets of Philadelphia’ but that, due to it being ‘another relationship album,’ was benched.

Going back a way – and as previously quoted on one of my former Springsteen posts – Bruce said of it: “there’s a record that we recorded, mixed and didn’t put out. Bob Clearmountain mixed it, spent a lot of time on it… didn’t put it out. That was, like, ’94. And it still intrigues me. I still go back to it. There are still things on it that I really like, and I may go back to sort of say, ‘Okay, well, why…?’ Sometimes it’s timing, you know. There was a particular reason that I didn’t put out that group of music. Sometimes the timing just doesn’t feel right for that kind of record.”

So why wasn’t the timing right? It was 1994 and if we look once again at the original Bruce Springsteen Timeline it’s an otherwise blank space between his tour to promote Human Touch and Lucky Town with ‘the other band’ and the year before the mini E Street Band reunion for Greatest Hits. The ’90s are often considered a fallow period for Bruce, but this box set has at least upheld my long-held belief that his output remained strong but his continual-second guessing after the relative mauling of the aforementioned double-header of ’92 albums meant we missed out on a lot. And miss out we certainly did for Streets of Philadelphia Sessions is the strongest set of songs he put together that entire decade.

‘Streets of Philadelphia’ was recorded by Bruce alone, using a drum machine and synths. While he bought in other musicians to round it out, he stuck with the ‘demo’ version for release. The success of that song – both critically and commercially – as well as the process, must have unlocked something as he decided to cut a whole album using the same approach. The ‘loops’ disc that Springsteen had been given to use only appears on a couple of the tracks, the rest are spare, bruising and subdued synth-lead pieces but often shot through with piercing guitar work and a number of songs on which a small band was bought in to round out the sound. The album was completed, mixed and was ear-marked for release early the next year (1995) and then, Bruce hesitated. Was it Roy Bittan suggesting that a fourth relationship-focused album would be one too many for his audience that triggered the hold? Was it Springsteen unsure of such a diversion from his established sound? Was it the record label pointing out a ‘Hits’ album was expected? Given that Bruce is now in the habit of ret-conning events to fit a certain PR-Friendly version of history, we’ll never really know. We do know that we almost got it during his residency on Broadway – perhaps he was tired of having such a considered ‘blank’ in his story for the ’90s that he wanted to set the record straight – and that this is only one of two albums in the set that Ron Aniello was forbidden from tinkering with. For which we can all be grateful.

This, for me, is the Springsteen album I’d been waiting for. The over-produced element that plagued Human Touch and Lucky Town is entirely absent, there’s a maturity and confidence in his restraint that means no feel or sound is overdone and nothing overshadows the lyrical content and, perhaps for the only time on a Springsteen record, there’s no feeling that there’s a ‘this the radio hit!’ moment. In fact, in between taking credit for ending the Cold War, Apartheid, world hunger and averting World War 3, Steven Van Zandt points out in his autobiography that it was this lack of an obvious ‘hit’ that lead to Springsteen canning it and reverting to his ‘Nebraska persona.’ Either way, Streets of Philadelphia sessions is a gorgeously produced and crafted set of songs that take the narrative and themes Tunnel of Love ushered in and adds a level of lived-in authenticity that works wonderfully with the singing voice he found in his forties.

If there were someway to have this on wax without plumping down the £300 (ish) needed for the box this wouldn’t have left my turntable this year. As it is, the mp3 versions have barely left my stereo.

Least: The Little Things

You know that mp3 version of the album I have? This isn’t on it. While there’s no ‘that’s the hit!’ moment on Streets of Philadelphia Sessions, this is the dud. While the remainder of this album’s songs feel true, this feels flippant, out of synch with the remainder and unnecessary (almost like the odd tangent of ‘Reno’ on Devils and Dust).

Most: Something In The Well

I could very easily have gone for many another track here. ‘One Beautiful Morning,’ ‘Between Heaven and Earth’ or ‘Waiting On The End Of The World’ are clear highlights but ‘Something In The Well’ is one of those songs that sits amongst his best work and points and future material too. Springsteen’s fights with the black dog are now well-documented but I don’t think I’ve ever heard such a struggle ever put so compellingly into song before that has made me go ‘holy fuck, that’s it’ – what I’ve often referred to as a ‘deep hole in a field,’ Springsteen casts as a well. Like so many other moments across this album, the instrumentation is minimal but not sparse and wholly effective. There’s also an element to the sound – if you strip it back to his guitar and vocal delivery – that’s at one with that which he’d flick back to in the following year for The Ghost of Tom Joad.

What makes Springsteen, when he’s on form like this, great as a song writer is his ability to look within, find what’s inside him and us, and turn it into something we can, and want, to listen to and ‘Something In The Well’ is another strong example of just that.