Overview
Springsteen re-assembled the E Street Band for the Reunion (Tracks) tour. This tour lasted for 16 months, from March 1999 thru June 2000. Although no studio sessions took place during this touring period, there was an expectation that studio work with the E Street Band would follow this tour and a resulting new E Street Band album would emerge in late 1999 or early 2000 – however we now know that no such E Street Band sessions ever took place. In spite of the lack of E Street Band involvement in the studio Springsteen did, in fact, conduct scattered solo sessions at his Thrill Hill East home studio during the September 2000 - January 2001 period. Numerous songs were recorded – but details remain very sketchy. It is suspected that the base recording of only one of the fifteen songs issued on The Rising album emanates from these sessions.
Springsteen finally entered the studio with The E Street Band in March 2001 – their first sessions together since January 1995. The spring 2001 sessions were produced by Springsteen and Chuck Plotkin and recorded by Toby Scott. Several songs (titles unconfirmed) were recorded during this session – but only one “American Skin (41 Shots)” has been released.
Following the tragic events of September 11, 2001, Springsteen wrote a number of new songs that were influenced by the disaster. A new series of studio sessions with the E Street Band took place in Atlanta from late January to mid-March 2002. Comments made by Garry Tallent and Danny Federici would indicate that the amount of time the E Street Band were together in Atlanta was actually very brief – a far cry from the E Street Band studio session formula of the 1973-84 era. All Southern Tracks Studios sessions were produced by Brendan O’Brien and recorded by Nick DiDia, neither of whom had worked with Springsteen previously. O’Brien also handled the mixing. It would appear that 14 of the 15 recordings issued on The Rising album were recorded at these sessions, although only about half of the songs that appear on the album were actually composed after 9/11. It is known that a total of seventeen songs were recorded during the sessions; fifteen on the album plus "Harry's Place" and "Down In The Hole", both of which would eventually be issued on 2014's High Hopes.