The Rising / Devils & Dust / Live in New York City / Live in Dublin / 18 Tracks

At the end of the ’90s, as he entered his fourth decade as a recording artist, Bruce Springsteen was thinking about resurrections. The first order of business was returning to New Jersey with his wife and bandmate Patti Scialfa, and their three children, after a few years in Los Angeles. He also reunited the E Street Band, the loyal crew he’d disassembled following his commercial peak in the ’80s, which had left him feeling, as he put it, “Bruced out.” His best work as a solo artist in the ’90s (“The Ghost of Tom Joad,” “Streets of Philadelphia”) found inspiration in understated outsider stories that he delivered like eulogies, miles away from the arena catharsis that audiences had come to expect from him.

With his most famous band reunited, Springsteen began writing for the masses again. The first new song he premiered during 1999’s reunion tour was “Land of Hope and Dreams.” To a steady, relaxed drumbeat, his bandmates reintroduced themselves—a glorious saxophone solo from Clarence Clemons, a sweeping mandolin refrain by Steve Van Zandt—while Springsteen conducted a spiritual roll call to kickstart this new era. “You’ll need a good companion,” he sang, “For this part of the ride.” Less optimistic but equally pivotal was “American Skin (41 Shots),” a ballad written for Amadou Diallo, a 23-year-old who was brutally killed by New York City police officers. In its lyrics, Springsteen juggled feelings of hopelessness, fear, and complicity; in live performances, he requested silence so that you could hear every word.

Although he later attempted both in the studio, the definitive versions of these songs appear on 2001’s Live in New York City, recorded during the final nights of the E Street Band’s reunion tour. (Compiled from various shows, it is a triumphant but inessential collection: for the full experience, hit the bootlegs.) That album is among five new installments in Springsteen’s ongoing vinyl reissue series. This time around, he’s highlighting a series of recent albums that have become nearly impossible to find on vinyl, with one of them (2007’s Live in Dublin) making its first appearance on the format. Compared to the first run of reissues, which highlighted his iconic run from his 1973 debut Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J. through 1984’s Born in the U.S.A., and a second that collected his mid-career wilderness period, these reissues serve a more functional role. For record collectors and completists, it might be your first opportunity to own any of them. For the uninitiated, there’s plenty of gold to discover.

Without a new album to promote, Springsteen prefaced the 1999 reunion tour by releasing Tracks, a fascinating box set that unloaded a quarter-century of studio outtakes and offered an alternate route through his history as a songwriter. A few months after its release came 18 Tracks, the abridged collection included in this set that acts as a sort of anti-greatest hits. In the streaming era, I’d recommend spending time with the complete edition, where you can hear the full range of his experiments and skip around based on what period of his career interests you most. Epics like “Thundercrack” and “Frankie” are among its classics, and both are excluded from this set, I imagine, for purposes of brevity. Still, 18 Tracks provides a solid-enough representation of his strengths, and this edition marks a good opportunity to revisit his lost gems (at least until Tracks gets a vinyl reissue).

Similar to Tracks, the music on Springsteen’s 2005 solo album Devils & Dust was salvaged from abandoned studio recordings. After 1995’s stripped-down The Ghost of Tom Joad and its resulting tour—his first time performing live without a band—Springsteen felt inspired to continue in this acoustic, folk setting. The hushed songs of Devils & Dust tell stories of men and women that range from biblical (“Jesus Was an Only Son”) to pornographic (“Reno,” which almost single-handedly earned this album his first Parental Advisory sticker) and personal (“Long Time Comin’,” one of the best songs of this era). Springsteen initially shelved the project in favor of the E Street reunion tour, but he returned to it a few years later after writing a mournful protest song about the Iraq War. Bringing to mind the darker songs he had left behind, it became this album’s title track and introduces one of the most challenging and detailed albums in Springsteen’s catalog, one more akin to moodier sets like Nebraska and Tunnel of Love than his more electric work through the rest of the 2000s.

He followed Devils & Dust with another left-turn, recording centuries-old folk songs with a group of musicians he dubbed the Sessions Band. We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions, from 2006, was a pleasant surprise, and its resulting tour was even better. Their opening night in New Orleans is often remembered as their peak, delivered as a tribute to the victims of Hurricane Katrina, but revisiting Live in Dublin has proven it to be an equally thrilling document. For starters, it is one of Springsteen’s most pristine-sounding live albums, capturing his energy as a frontman but also showcasing the dynamic among his band—their banjos and fiddles, horns and strings, all arranged in joyful chaos. The material itself is equally wide-ranging. An almost unrecognizable rendition of “Atlantic City” opens the set, and the traditional folk music (“How Can a Poor Man Stand Such Times and Live,” “O Mary Don’t You Weep”) rings just as true as his own deep cuts. Time has been good to this era of Springsteen’s career, and Live in Dublin captures its peak.

Part of the reason why We Shall Overcome felt like such a breakthrough upon release in 2006 was its loose, live-sounding production. A common complaint about Springsteen’s records in the 21st century has been their sound, and while they all fare better on vinyl, the issue was beginning to show its head here. In his 2016 memoir, Springsteen discusses his attempts to self-produce the E Street Band’s comeback album after their reunion tour. (“WE WERE DULL,” he laments of the sessions, in all-caps.) And so he hired Brendan O’Brien, a producer who worked with grunge bands like Pearl Jam and Stone Temple Pilots. His signature trick for Springsteen involved compressing the music and backing him with low drones: cellos, hurdy-gurdy, layers of tinny, distorted electric guitar. The goal might have been to summon the epic swell of his live shows, but it often muddied the sound of his band. Still, when the material sang, the production was easy to forgive.

Such was the case on 2002’s The Rising, a pivotal record often generalized as Springsteen’s response to 9/11. Stories have since circulated about him making phone calls to survivors shortly after the attacks to help find a sense of community, to understand the quieter stories behind the big, looming one. Many of these songs serve similar purposes for him as a writer, as he fills the album’s 70-plus minute runtime with choruses that sound like prayers and love songs that double as long goodbyes. It spanned material that directly referenced the tragedy (“The Rising,” “Empty Sky”) and others that dated back to the ’90s (“Nothing Man,” “Waitin’ on a Sunny Day”). Near The Rising’s completion, O’Brien suggested Springsteen cut down the tracklist to help clarify the message. No, he responded, the sprawl is the point.

An early song he wrote for the album is its closing track, “My City of Ruins.” While this era of Springsteen’s career collects several of his most heartbreaking songs—Devils & Dust’s “Matamoras Bank,” The Rising’s “Paradise”—this one feels especially personal. He began writing it at the end of 2000 about the economic decline in his hometown of Asbury Park. The setting that provided the magic and electricity in so much of his early work now appeared in bleak fragments, with Springsteen’s own history folded into its faded scenery. To a soulful melody, he acts as a tour guide before bringing it back home: “There’s tears on the pillow, darling, where we slept/You took my heart when you left.” Just before the final chorus, he asks, “Tell me how do I begin again?” In the same place where he started, finding his footing in the community that both inspired and boxed him in, he was posing a new challenge to himself, coming to terms with those things that die and don’t come back. But for now, he felt inspired and alive. So he got back to work.

Buy: The Rising - Rough Trade / Devils & Dust - Rough Trade / Live in New York City - Rough Trade / Live in Dublin - Rough Trade / 18 Tracks - Rough Trade

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