Bruce Springsteen has always been a haunted man.

Haunted by his father’s silence and the black dog of depression. Haunted by his country’s sins and his survival of them. Haunted, above all, by the music he didn’t release.

Now, at 75 — older than Elvis ever imagined, more lucid than Dylan ever let on — he flings open the vault with “Tracks II: The Lost Albums,” a seven-record, 83-song reckoning with the ghosts that have followed him through decades of writing, recording and withholding. It’s more than a boxed set. It’s a seance.

“Tracks II” reframes what we thought we knew about Bruce Springsteen: the man, the voice, the point of view that has narrated 50 years of American longing, heartbreak and restless grace.

This is a man in the final quarter of his life, opening up the drawer of songs too painful, too weird, or too risky to release. Until now.

The Secret Life of Bruce Springsteen

Springsteen once said he released records the way a novelist writes chapters — deliberately, seasonally, each one in conversation with the last. “The records in this collection,” he writes in the liner notes, “did not comfortably fit into that narrative, my creative arc.”

Yet they are a narrative — about misfit songs, side routes, withheld truths. They show Springsteen as a chronicler of American lives as well as a man wrestling with his own. In some cases, the music was mixed and mastered decades ago, then quietly filed away. Others were partially developed before being sidelined in favor of a more commercial — or more “Bruce-like” — release.

“Twilight Hours,” recorded between 2010 and 2011, is the set’s lushest surprise. It’s a companion piece to 2019’s “Western Stars,” but more radical in its embrace of orchestral early-’60s pop textures. Think of it as Springsteen’s Bacharach album, or his quiet tip of the hat to Sinatra’s “In the Wee Small Hours.” Strings, oboes, French horns, brushed drums, and a trembling croon: music not just arranged, but upholstered. The opening track, “September Kisses,” is a fog-lit meditation on memory and regret, as fragile as it is formal. “Dinner at Eight” feels lifted from a John Cheever story — the post-prandial ache of a couple too familiar with each other’s silences.

The highlight of the album, and possibly the entire set, is “Sunday Love,” which finds Springsteen in full crooner mode, yet emotionally unguarded. The arrangement is warm and swaying: brushed drums, soft electric piano, strings that seem to hover just above the beat. Think Harry Nilsson covering Sinatra on a rainy afternoon, or Jimmy Webb arranging a postscript to “By the Time I Get to Phoenix.”

What sets “Sunday Love” apart is the atmosphere: domestic, melancholic, strangely sacred. Springsteen isn’t singing about grand passion or road-wrecked lust. He’s singing about the after. The waiting. The Sunday morning silence that lingers after a Saturday night that didn’t quite end right.

“Coffee’s gone cold/TV’s humming/You said you’d call/But no one’s coming” — the lyric is uncharacteristically minimal, almost Carveresque. This isn’t the dreamer from “Thunder Road” pleading for escape, or the devoted partner of........

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