Bruce Springsteen’s Tracks II: The Lost Albums was released last Friday, bestowing upon us 83 new songs by the Boss recorded between 1983 and 2018. Because the vast majority of these numbers were previously unreleased, they make us confront the past head-on—in some ways we may not have anticipated.
As my colleague Alex Pappademas put it when writing about the Streets of Philadelphia Sessions portion of Tracks II, it’s a “positively revelatory album of mournful synth-voice-and-beats songs, many of them about troubled relationships, recorded at home in 1994 by a 45-year-old singer-songwriter from Los Angeles by way of New Jersey, and it will instantly, retroactively go down as one of the best albums of that year.”
I couldn’t have put it better myself—but that’s not what we’re here to talk about. You see, that review also included a moody, atmospheric photo of the Boss circa 1994. In it, he’s wearing rugged black jeans and a drapey gray button-down, accessorized by sleek silver jewelry. Looking at him bathed in light (specifically, the burning hot stage lights of the MTV Video Music Awards at Radio City Music Hall), I was struck by an epiphany: though conventional wisdom says otherwise, Bruce Springsteen’s ’90s style was incredibly sick.
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The ’90s were generally considered something of a lost decade for Springsteen, a perception no doubt meant to be challenged by this new compilation. “I often read about myself in the ’90s as having a lost period, or something,” Springsteen said recently in a video promoting Tracks II. “Really, I was working the whole time.” He was referring, of course, to his music—the E Street Band was on hiatus until midway through the decade and he had recently become a dad of two and was focusing on fatherhood.
But he might as well have been speaking sartorially, too.
Bruce is a perennial menswear moodboard favorite. You can’t throw a guitar pick without hitting a photo of him in his ragtag down the shore days, or looking like the epitome of an effortlessly cool, crowd-commanding rock star. The man loves an outfit almost as much as he loves a mid-song vocal interjection. (Come on now!) As I previously chronicled, he even kept showing up to the set of his own forthcoming biopic, Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere, while wearing a different, incredibly distinct piece of outerwear each time.
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