Music by the book

In 2016, the “autobiography soundtrack” gathered momentum as a medium by which record companies repackage and sell old rock ’n’ roll to aging audiences that still prefer buying to streaming.

Stripped-down versions of the box sets, these single-disc offerings mix greatest hits with previously unreleased cuts and attempt to represent in music the lives that accompanying autobiographies depict in prose.

In the case of Robbie Robertson’s Testimony (Capitol), the music eclipses the book. An unfocused, sprawling tome, the autobiography finds the 73-year-old Robertson, who first achieved fame in the 1960s as Bob Dylan’s lead guitarist and later as the main songwriter of the Americana forefathers The Band, describing his first 33 years, apparently stopping only because he’d hit 500 pages.

The accompanying 18-cut album, by comparison, is not only a model of concision but also an efficient, chronology-jumbling way for latecomers to Robertson’s oeuvre to acquaint themselves with its many diverse facets. In particular, excerpts from his solo-artist years, a period his book doesn’t mention, remind listeners that Robertson didn’t run out of steam after bidding The Band adieu. “Soap Box Preacher” (from his 1991 album Storyville), for instance, is a moving tribute to a perambulating, cross-bearing evangelist in the tradition of Arthur Blessitt that’s almost as tuneful and evocative of spiritual mysteries as his best-known compositions, “The Weight” and “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down.”

Testimony includes previously released live versions of those songs as well as studio versions of “Out of the Blue,” “It Makes No Difference,” and “Twilight,” three of the most beautiful songs Robertson ever composed for The Band or anyone else, himself included. It’s two obscurities, however, that make Testimony especially valuable. “He Don’t Love You (and He’ll Break Your Heart)” and “I’m Gonna Play the Honky Tonks” date from the mid-’60s, when The Band was known as Levon & The Hawks. Sung by Richard Manuel in a voice blending Ray Charles and Joe Cocker, they reveal Robertson’s ability to compose more-than-reasonable facsimiles of the kinds of soulful R&B then in vogue among Motown’s and Atlantic’s performing artists.

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The obscurities among the 18 tracks of Bruce Springsteen’s Chapter and Verse (Columbia), released in conjunction with his autobiography Born to Run, don’t pack as much wallop. Whether documenting Springsteen’s early days as an inadvertent “new Dylan” or his earlier days as a member of the New Jersey bar-band stalwarts The Castiles (1966-67) and Steel Mill (1970), the first six selections only hint at what he’d accomplish once he hit his stride.

He did so on his second album, The Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle, an accomplishment that Chapter and Verse acknowledges by beginning its cherry-picking of official highlights there. And by sticking mainly to obvious choices (“Born to Run,” “Born in the U.S.A.,” “Brilliant Disguise”) and avoiding anything from Springsteen’s handful of negligible efforts, it honors the emotional heights on which he has consistently set his sights and that he has repeatedly, if inconsistently, scaled.

But Springsteen’s best recording of 2016 isn’t Chapter and Verse. It’s his audiobook reading of Born to Run.

As a singer, Springsteen can come on too strong, overwhelming the intricate intimacies of his obsessively wrought sound and lyrics. As a reader, he’s enough out of his natural element to concentrate on getting the cadences—humility and humor among them—just right. And for all 18 hours of this impressive performance, get them right he does.