The recordings, which date from 1983 to 2018, will “fill in rich chapters of Springsteen’s expansive career timeline – while offering invaluable insight into his life and work as an artist,” said Sony Music.
Among them are working tapes from the sessions that led to rock classic Born In The USA, and an album that experimented with drum loops and synthesisers from the early 1990s.
“I’ve played this music to myself and often close friends for years now,” Springsteen said in a statement. “I’m glad you’ll get a chance to finally hear them. I hope you enjoy them.”
The music will be revealed on a box set of seven CDs (or nine vinyl discs), titled Tracks II: The Lost Albums.
The scale of the release is quite different from its predecessor, Tracks, whose four discs collected random off-cuts and b-sides from the first 25 years of Springsteen’s career.
According to a press release, Tracks II will feature 83 songs, of which 74 have never been officially released in any form.
Many of the tracks, including Fugitive’s Dream and Don’t Back Down on Our Love, have circulated on bootlegs for years, but will finally be heard in studio quality.
Springsteen said the release had been made possible when the Covid-19 pandemic allowed him to “finish everything I had in my vault”.
Fans have known for years that Springsteen’s vault contains hours and hours of unheard material.
Speaking to Variety magazine in 2017, the star admitted: “We’ve made many more records than we released. Why didn’t we release those records? I didn’t think they were essential.
“I might have thought they were good, I might have had fun making them… but over my entire work life, I felt like I released what was essential at a certain moment, and what I got in return was a very sharp definition of who I was, what I want to do, what I was singing about.
“And I still basically judge what I’m doing by the same set of rules.”
In a video trailer for Tracks II, Springsteen added: “I often read about myself in the ’90s as having some lost period or something.
“And I really, really was working the whole time.”