Rock Icon Reveals Why He Wasn’t Happy With His Biggest Album originally appeared on Parade.
Even The Boss has his creative what-ifs.
In a candid new interview with Rolling Stone ahead of the release of Tracks II: The Lost Albums—his highly anticipated box set arriving Friday—Bruce Springsteen opened up about his complicated feelings toward the megahit 1984 release, Born in the U.S.A.
And though the record cemented him as a global superstar and sold over 30 million copies worldwide, it wasn’t exactly the album he envisioned.
“It became the record I made, not necessarily the record that I was interested in making,” Springsteen, 75, admitted. “I was interested in taking Nebraska and making a full record that had somewhat that same feeling.”
Fans familiar with both records might see the thread Springsteen was after.
“If you hear ‘My Hometown’ and you hear ‘Born in the U.S.A.,’ they were sort of the bookends I intended,” he explained. “And the rest of the stuff was… just what I had at the time. Those were the songs I wrote. Those were the songs I recorded.”
In the liner notes for Tracks II, Springsteen makes his feelings even more clear, revealing that he “wasn’t happy” with the album and felt it didn’t “connect” the way his earlier work did.
“From conception to execution, it was not necessarily the record that in my mind I had planned on,” he said. “But that’s the way creativity works. You go in the studio, you have an idea. It’s not necessarily what you come out with.”
When Rolling Stone reporter Andy Greene likened the album to a collection of dispatches from the Reagan-era America, Springsteen agreed—but noted that he had something a bit darker in mind than the anthemic project Born in the U.S.A came to be known as.
“The themes of Nebraska are in there—in ‘Downbound Train,’ they’re in there,” he said, though somewhat “disguised into pop music.”
As for what could have been, Springsteen offers a glimpse of that on Tracks II, particularly with the project L.A. Garage Sessions—an entire unreleased album recorded between Nebraska and Born in the U.S.A.
“I enjoyed the recording and the experience of Nebraska, and thought I might continue in that vein with a small rhythm section, still very lo-fi, and a new group of songs,” he said. “At the time I wasn’t sure where I was going with Born in the U.S.A. I had half the record, but I didn’t have the other half. And so it was just a record that happened in between those two records.”
Though Tracks II is just days from its release, Springsteen has more in the vault ready and waiting. Tracks III, yet another five-album collection of unreleased material, is finished, the rock legend revealed, though no release date has yet been announced.
Tracks II: The Lost Albums drops June 27.
Rock Icon Reveals Why He Wasn’t Happy With His Biggest Album first appeared on Parade on Jun 23, 2025
This story was originally reported by Parade on Jun 23, 2025, where it first appeared.
