Another Side of Bruce Springsteen

Over Father’s Day weekend, while the military paraded in Washington and protesters marched everywhere else, an old New Yorker cartoon was circulating on social media among my fellow music obsessives of a certain age: A teen lounges on a couch, scrolling on her phone alongside her wine-sipping mom, and announces, “As a Father’s Day gift, I’m going to let Dad explain a Bruce Springsteen song to me.” The joke landed a little sharply for me given that instead of being out marching anywhere, I was home, listening to the seven (yes, seven) previously unheard Springsteen albums that make up his new set, Tracks II: The Lost Albums, so that I could in some sense, reader, “explain” them to you.