A Bruce Springsteen film soundtrack. Not just one track, mind. An entire set of songs. Original songs, theme, the lot. That’s what we have with Faithless, the fifth album (chronologically) on Tracks II: The Lost Albums.

Artists creating the entire soundtrack to a film is nothing new – even a quick scan through my record rack will find Mark Knoplfer’s Local Hero, Air’s Virgin Suicides and Eddie Vedder’s Into The Wild and that’s just a few that bounce into mind. This wouldn’t even be Bruce’s first dabble in film either – Streets of Philadelphia, The Wrestler, Dead Man Walkin’ and Limbo all got dedicated songs. But who, or what, could get the man they call Boss to take a break from counting his money and posting duck-face selfies on the ‘gram to pen an entire soundtrack and would it be any cop? We have the answer to both of those questions that, until this archival release, nobody had really thought to ask.

The first question first. Odds are that the set of songs Bruce was commissioned “back in the early 2000s” to write for a western that dealt with some spiritual issues and since seemingly shelved (or, ‘still in development’) is Martin Scorsese’s adaptation of Thomas Eidson’s ‘St. Agnes’ Stand’ – the story of a reluctant hero on the run who saves a nun and a group of children from Apache Indians. The theme fits and Scorsese is one of the very few filmmakers with enough clout to get Springsteen to commit to a full score.

The second question is answered with a resounding ‘fucking hell, yes.’

If we look at where Faithless sits on The Bruce Springsteen Timeline, this sits immediately after Devils & Dust. Springsteen is deep in his most stripped, inward-facing mode, having again walked away from stadium expectations to follow up The Rising and clearly uninterested in returning to them just yet – he’d follow Devils & Dust and the Faithless sessions with We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions before eventually returning to his ‘rock’ voice with Magic. Heard in that context, Faithless feels like a continuation – maybe even a further stripping-back – of the same instincts but with a muse not of his own. He’s marrying his own exploration of America with that of Scorsese and Eidson and the album’s meditative, frontier-adjacent tone lines up neatly with the novel’s long, spiritual road through devastation and doubt. What makes this set’s inclusion on Tracks II such an unexpected gift is that even divorced from that context, the music still feels cinematic, wide, patient, and morally weighty. All the ingredients of a bloody good Springsteen album.

What’s most striking about the album, even now after listening to it more times than I can count, is how open it is. Not unfinished (Ron Aniello later polished up the mostly-Bruce tracks with some upright bass, drums and strings), not tentative, but spacious in a way Springsteen rarely allows himself. The songs across Faithless don’t rush to fill the silence or underline their meaning. They sit, they linger, they leave room for the listener to wander. It’s closer in spirit to the kind of slow-burn atmosphere you’d expect from Tom Waits at his most skeletal, or from the desolate, morally heavy film scores Nick Cave and Warren Ellis have made their signature, than to anything in Springsteen’s traditional rock lineage. Again, given where these sessions sit – recorded in two weeks before any film was shot (if it ever was) during a short spell in Florida with his daughter – right after Devils & Dust but somehow sharing some of Inyo‘s spirit and even the ‘man wracked with self-doubt’ themes of Streets of Philadelphia Sessions.

Like many great soundtrack albums, Faithless actually works much better as a standalone piece than it probably has any right to. Again, I’m thinking back to the likes of Eddie Vedder’s Into The Wild and even Tom Petty and the Heartbreaker’s She’s The One – in these instances, with the instrumental cues fleshed out just a little more and shod of the repetitiveness of the ‘theme’ these could have been great albums (as the later release of Angel Dream proved for the latter). In the case of Faithless, though, that’s not necessary. While four of the eleven tracks are instrumental – it was meant to be a soundtrack after all – this could happily sit within Springsteen’s canon. An albeit brief but quietly compelling release: open, austere, and – freed from the pressure of being a studio album proper – unconcerned with being liked.

Least: My Master’s Hand (Theme)

This is a cheap ‘get out’ of a Least pick. Simply because, by dent of being a soundtrack, there’s a little repetition with ‘My Master’s Hand (Theme).’ It’s a lovely tune, don’t get me wrong, but only two tracks before hand we have the much more beautiful ‘My Master’s Hand’ making the ‘(Theme)’ version a little superfluous in this sense.

Most: Faithless

There’s a lot to love on Faithless – I could just as easily have dropped ‘Let Me Ride’ or ‘God Sent You’ in here but I keep coming back to the album’s title track as my favourite. A slow, mediative and atmospheric track that rewards with each repeated listen.