Bruce Springsteen’s first seven albums will be reissued as a CD or vinyl box set, with five of them remastered for the first time for CD, and all the vinyl editions getting the remaster treatment for the first time. Accompanied by a 60-page book, The Album Collection Vol 1 1973-1984 is due out on 17 November.
Coinciding with Springsteen’s 65th birthday, the set incorporates the following albums: Greetings from Asbury Park, NJ; The Wild, the Innocent and the E Street Shuffle; Born to Run; Darkness on the Edge of Town; The River; Nebraska; and Born in the USA.
To clean up the audio, Springsteen worked with long-time collaborator Toby Scott, as well as Bob Ludwig, an engineering legend who has mastered most of the Boss’s albums since the early 80s. They transferred audio from the original analogue tapes, using a modern technique called the Plangent Process. “The process allows the tape playback to sound closer to the output of the mixing console than ever before,” Ludwig told the fan site Backstreets. “[There’s] a sonic depth and clarity not heard since the original mix-down session.”
“I didn’t expect that the first three albums especially would sound so suddenly clear and full of depth,” Ludwig went on. “I was hearing parts that had never stood out before … the horns and percussion on E Street Shuffle, the guitars on Sandy … The arrangements seemed to come together in a way that I was literally hearing for the first time.”
Each of the newly scrubbed records will be packaged in a recreation of its original sleeve, and the set’s comprehensive liner notes include old photos and vintage press clippings. According to Ludwig, Springsteen has already agreed to the remastering of “the remainder of the catalogue”. It’s a slightly different project: compared to Springsteen’s early records, which were mixed to tape, most of the later albums were mixed to digital. “It is more a matter of finessing the original to retain the intent while improving the fidelity and creating 24-bit final masters,” Ludwig said.
“Do they sound different? Absolutely!” he promised. “If I didn’t already have them, I’d go out and buy the new versions – and this is from a fan, not a marketing person.”
Besides the box set, Springsteen also has another release planned for this fall: Outlaw Pete, an illustrated children’s book, will be published on 4 November.
