Among the projects Bruce Springsteen has in the pipeline is a second volume of Tracks, his 1998 four-CD box set of unreleased songs and B-sides.

“There’s a lot of really good music left.” As he's done with some of his archival releases, Springsteen isn't just giving the material a modern mastering, but he's overdubbing some as well. “You just go back there. It’s not that hard. If I pull out something from 1980, or 1985 or 1970, it’s amazing how you can slip into that voice. It’s just sort of a headspace. All of those voices remain available to me, if I want to go to them.”

E Street Band drummer Max Weinberg added that he's recorded new parts for more than 40 songs over the past three years. “Any other artist would kill to get these songs," he said.

I'm wondering whether this will focus on the early material, keeping it out of the public domain. I used to have a bunch of early 70's stuff on bootleg. It was revelatory, as so little of the material made it onto his early albums, and I believe I saw a quote that confirmed what I suspected--some of the songs on his forthcoming album are newly recorded versions of his early songs from this era.

"I have a box set of five unreleased albums that are basically post-1988," Springsteen said. "People have always wondered...People look at my work in the '90s and they go, 'The '90s wasn't a great decade for Bruce. He was kind of doing this and he wasn't in the E Street Band...' I actually made a lot of music during that period of time. I actually made albums. For one reason or another, the timing wasn't right or whatever; I didn't put them out."

He added that he'd assembled the collection after spending a recent winter "completely cleaning out the vault," and continued: "Some of it is older stuff that the band plays on, and some of it is newer stuff where I was conceptualizing during that period of time. It'll give people a chance to reassess what I was doing during that time period. Also, a lot of the stuff is really weird...I can't wait to see the response to some of it."

Springsteen confirmed a long-standing rumor that one of his unheard albums is entirely based on drum looping. "That's going to be as weird as people think it's going to be," he said. "But it uses all drum loops and things like that, and it uses synthesizers. I like the record myself. But the first thing we're putting out is a series of albums. It's going to be so interesting to see the fan response because I love them all.”

He reported that the box set would arrive "in the near future".