During a chat on SiriusXM's E Street Radio, Bruce Springsteen answered the question that's been puzzling fans — “How did those unreleased early-70's songs find their way onto the new Letter To You album?”
Letter To You includes nine recently written Springsteen songs — alongside new recordings of three of his legendary — but previously unreleased — compositions from the early-1970's: “Janey Needs A Shooter,” “Song For The Orphans,” and the iconic “If I Was The Priest.”
Springsteen explained how the revamped songs came to see release: “We were working the year previous on a Tracks 2, so I happened to go through all of the songs that were on the John Hammond demo tape as potential tracks for Tracks 2. And I came across those songs, and I said, 'Wow, these are pretty good. I'd be interested to see what it would sound like now with the band playing these songs' — which were pre-Greetings From Asbury Park, NJ, never released. . . an entire album, at least. So it just sort of grew from that.”
“The Boss” went on to say, “Also, I cut 'Janey Needs A Shooter' as a single piece for what I thought was going to be a Record Store Day release here in the United States, but it ended up sounding so good, I said, 'That sounds like an album cut.' And so I just held onto it, and then one thing led to another. . . It was all sorts of happy accidents happening all over the place.”
Springsteen spoke candidly to Apple Music and shed light on how he and wife Patti Scialfa have been managing through the pandemic: “I haven't had any particular secret as how to deal with the whole thing. Y'know, Patti and I, we've literally just been takin' it a day at a time, doin' what we can. And, y'know, we were lucky in that we made our record and shot the film of it a few months before the virus hit, so, I had something to do. I could do it with a relatively small group of people — that helped a lot. I've been able to stay busy, which has helped, but it's just been a day at a time, like everybody else. I don't have any (laughs). . . I don't have any great wisdom as how to get through whatever this is that we've been going through, y'know?”
There's been no release date announced for Bruce Springsteen's eagerly awaited Tracks 2 collection.
