Springsteen’s Other America

Two of Bruce Springsteen’s “Lost Albums” — “Inyo” and “Faithless” — explore California, where he lived briefly in the ’80s, as place and Catholicism as the faith that shaped his childhood. Evelyn McDonnell, professor of journalism, guides us along the paths.

Luis Villalobos’ bow chases notes up and down the violin strings for 18 thrilling seconds. It’s a dramatic, achingly beautiful solo — and then the harp and the strings and the horns swell in. A man sings, taking up the escalating melody of the fiddle with a solemn request: “Godmother when I die, make of my clay a jar/ And when you are thirsty, drink from it.” The soft tenor breaks on “die” and “jar” and “it,” splitting one syllable into two. The song’s story, “The Lost Charro,” is told from the viewpoint of a Mexican charro, a proud cowboy known for his intricate rope tricks and skilled riding, who has given up his saddle to pick “lettuce in Salinas … prunes in Santa Clara.” The singer whose voice soars into a haunting falsetto on the refrain “the rope wi-i-inds” is Bruce Springsteen, and instead of the E Street Band, the prodigal son of New Jersey is backed by mariachi players on “The Lost Charro” and “Adelita,” the album’s preceding track, about a female soldier in the Mexican-American War.

The tunes are on “Inyo,” one of the seven “lost albums” released as part of the deluxe box set “Tracks II: The Lost Albums” last year. The package makes evident not just the artist’s almost pathological prolificness but also the layers of his craft that go much deeper than the hits and headlines often associated with the Boss. Considering that these 83 songs were essentially rejects from the artist’s 20 studio albums and other assorted compilations, they demonstrate that Springsteen’s worst is better than most musicians’ best. Their stylistic range — torch song, honky-tonk, synth-pop, bolero, garage rock, folk ballad, etc. — and lyrical depth make a strong case for Springsteen as the greatest American songwriter of the last half-century, one who has taken his quest to understand the broken promises of our land from east coast to west. Inyo is the name of the county that houses Death Valley, the lowest point in North America, and Mount Whitney, the highest peak in the contiguous U.S. Repeatedly on “The Lost Albums,” the peaks and valleys of California are the Jersey boy’s muse, where he journeys to restore his faith in the broken American dream — and himself.

It has been a busy, dramatic year for the 76-year-old 20-time Grammy winner. In May 2025, Springsteen became the first major celebrity to speak out against the Trump regime, opening his European tour in Manchester by asking “all who believe in democracy and the best of our American experience to rise with us, raise your voices against authoritarianism, and let freedom ring.” The president responded by calling the singer “highly overrated.” In moves that were obviously long planned but provided a knockout rebuttal to Trump’s insults, Springsteen released “Tracks II” and an expanded edition of “Nebraska,” his 1982 solo album. In September an entire academic conference was devoted to the Boss (in Jersey, of course). Meanwhile hunky “The Bear” star Jeremy Allen White played Bruce in the fall biopic “Deliver Me From Nowhere,” a film about the struggle to maintain artistic integrity. In January, Springsteen released “Streets of Minneapolis,” a searing critique of ICE and a paean to the people of Minnesota that promptly topped the iTunes chart. In February he announced a U.S. tour that started in Minneapolis in March and ends in Philadelphia, in May, saying, “Come on out and join the United Free Republic of E Street Nation for an American spring of Rock ’n’ Rebellion!”

Springsteen has long been known for his anthems and protest songs, from “Born to Run” to “Born in the USA” to “41 Shots” to “The Rising.” But the lost albums make clear that his truest calling is penning deeply empathetic portraits of regular, remarkable people: underdogs, gardeners, cops, couch potatoes, bartenders, gang members, veterans, car thieves, the repo man, women who have been betrayed, and the men who have betrayed them. Some of his underclass subjects are working class heroes like the lost charro; others are antiheroes like “The Klansman.” Springsteen’s greatest gift is taking what people used to lump together as the masses and making us see them as individuals. He puts himself in other people’s shoes, the good, the bad, the ugly, and the beautiful.

I have to admit I was skeptical when I opened the big box that my brother had gifted me (“Tracks II” was not in my professorial budget) filled with a hardcover book, a bookmark, a fake matchbook, and other assorted collector odds and ends. I’m philosophically opposed to the repackaging of outtakes to wring more money from hardworking fans’ hands and in fact said as much in a 1998 review of “Tracks,” the lost albums’ predecessor. But then I put on the seven CDs buried amidst the ephemera. Many were recorded during the same periods of some of his greatest albums in this longtime fan’s opinion: “Nebraska,” “The Ghost of Tom Joad,” “Devils and Dust,” “The Rising.”

The influence of California is patently evident in the title of the first CD in this chronological sequence: “LA Garage Sessions ’83.” Springsteen moved to Los Angeles in 1982. He set up a studio at his house in the Hollywood Hills and honed the solo sound he had crafted on “Nebraska,” as portrayed in “Deliver Me From Nowhere.” When he wasn’t recording, he rode his motorcycle up the coast, or through the hills of the Sierra Nevadas and the desert of the Owens Valley. The songs on “Garage Sessions” depict the America of the small towns he saw on these rides as well as on his drive across country when he changed coasts, following that dream, to paraphrase the first track.

Bruce became a bona fide Californian when the Northridge earthquake forced him to relocate, to Bel Air. The music he and engineer Toby Scott recorded in the new home studio was influenced by the most important Southern California musical development of that era: gangster rap. The stories of local heroes spun by N.W.A. probably inspired him lyrically, but it was the sound of these songs, built on drum loops, that became the sonic base of “Streets of Philadelphia Sessions.” On these tracks inspired by his Oscar-winning song for the film of that name, Springsteen uses electronic beats as haunting soundtracks for stories of betrayal and infidelity. “There are some secrets that should never be told,” he sings mournfully on “Something in the Well” over a backdrop of echoing guitar feedback. A few years earlier, his first marriage had blown up after paparazzi caught him on holiday with E Street Band singer Patti Scialfa. (They subsequently married and have three children together, and one grandchild.)

“Faithless” is the title of the third disc, the soundtrack for a film that was never made. The quest here begins with “The Desert,” an instrumental that captures the rattle and hum of one of the earth’s most difficult climates, where seekers have long traveled for answers to life’s meaning and visions of gods. Like so many of the collection’s songs — like so much of the Boss’s oeuvre — this album is about faith and the lack thereof. But the 11 tracks here may be the most directly spiritual the soul searcher has ever recorded. “All God’s Children,” “God Sent You,” “My Master’s Hand”: These are gospel hymns from a man who long ago separated from his Catholic upbringing and is haunted by it. “A lot of the songs have to do with my obsession with the idea of sin,” Springsteen says in the documentary “The Promise,” about the making of his 1978 album “Darkness on the Edge of Town.” “What is it for? What is a good life? … How do you carry your sins?”

On “Faithless” and “Inyo,” Bruce rides his motorcycle through the American landscape: a modern-day cowboy, or maybe a traveling preacher, still looking for “The Promised Land,” one of the great “Darkness” tracks. On “Inyo,” he travels from California’s Owens Valley to the Rio Grande. The opening, title track summarizes William Mulholland’s infamous land grab in the water wars of the early 20th century in four poetic minutes and 37 seconds — two hours fewer than Roman Polanski’s “Chinatown.” “Inyo” is about the American dream crashing into the Pacific then burning up in the desert, and the lives lost along the way. Indigenous villages. The workers who blasted the tunnels in the mountains. Mexican families. In the liner notes, Springsteen says he wrote much of the album while living in Los Angeles in the 1990s and reading stories in the Los Angeles Times about immigration. He could have written it yesterday.

Each of the lost albums offers various genre explorations. On “Faithless” it’s gospel; on “Somewhere North of Nashville,” it’s country. On “Inyo,” he dares to experiment with the music of another culture, Latin music. He explicitly follows the footsteps of Ry Cooder in this; in 1988 he performed “Across the Borderline,” written by Cooder, John Hiatt, and Jim Dickinson, while on tour, broadening his understanding of what it means to be born in America.

Bruce is smart enough not to parachute into foreign territory. He enlists talented musicians, such as the brothers Luis and Alberto Villalobos, Miguel Ponce, and Jorge Espinosa. He does his homework, citing books on the Mexican corrido by Maria Herrera-Sobek and on charros by Kathleen Mullen Sands in the liner notes. His intentions are certainly good: In telling the tales of the American West, he purposely centers the voices that are too often left out. He has been far ahead of popular culture on these topics for years; his 2005 album “Devils and Dust” includes the song “Black Cowboys,” 19 years before Beyonce’s “Cowboy Carter.”

Still, “Adelita,” “The Aztec Dance,” “The Lost Charro,” and “El Jardiniero (Upon the Death of Ramona)” are made for white ears, like mine. In “Ciudad Juarez” I hear repeated headlines of missing and murdered women brought to sentimental life in a song about a father mourning his daughter. My colleague Rubén Martínez, a fellow traveler in the works of Springsteen and a musician himself, hears a bolero that is too on the nose in its formulaic predictability. Maybe Bruce knew this. Maybe he shelved these songs in fear that he would be accused of cultural appropriation.

But I can’t get the “wi-i-inds” of the charro’s rope out of my head. That breaking lift in Bruce’s voice triggers a shift in consciousness: from what is to what was and what could be. Today the hero picks produce, but once, he was a master craftsman, a proud horseman, a symbol of the American West — borders be damned.

Evelyn McDonnell teaches in journalism in the LMU Bellarmine College of Liberal Arts. Her most recent book is “The World According to Joan Didion.” In March 2026, she reviewed the launch of Bruce Springsteen’s latest tour for The New York Times. Read her “Joan Didion’s California Odyssey” in the winter 2023 issue of LMU Magazine.