If you had somehow made it through your whole life without hearing, or hearing about, Bruce Springsteen, I could play you Streets of Philadelphia Sessions—one of seven new-to-you-and-me Bruce Springsteen albums in the mammoth new boxed set Tracks II: The Lost Albums, which comes out June 27—and tell you this about it, without really lying: It’s a previously unheard, positively revelatory album of mournful synth-voice-and-beats songs, many of them about troubled relationships, recorded at home in 1994 by a 45-year-old singer-songwriter from Los Angeles by way of New Jersey, and it will instantly, retroactively go down as one of the best albums of that year.
Which is all true—except the guy in question is Bruce Springsteen. Like a lot of artists across the singer-songwriter spectrum in ’94, from Portishead on Dummy to Beck on Mellow Gold, Springsteen was invigorating his craft by messing around with rhythm tracks derived from hip-hop; unlike Portishead and Beck, he was Bruce Springsteen, holed up in his home studio in the years between Human Touch/Lucky Town and The Ghost of Tom Joad, chasing the same haunted synth-driven thread he’d first pulled on for “Streets of Philadelphia,” the movie theme song that would win him his first Academy Award in March ‘94.
And of course his great lost album is a moody synthesizer record. Alan Vega, of the confrontationally minimalist synth-punk duo Suicide, once recalled Springsteen dropping by to listen to the second Suicide album in a room where Vega and his partner Martin Rev were playing it for some big shots from their label. When it was over there was only stricken silence until Bruce said, “That was fucking great.” Rolling Stone called Suicide’s self-titled 1977 debut “puerile” and critic Robert Christgau called it “silliness,” and even I do not regularly throw on “Frankie Teardrop,” a ten-plus-minute screech about a factory worker who annihilates his family, guaranteed to murder any mood unless you’re already bleeding out in a strobe-lit basement. “Yeah! Oh my God! That’s one of the most amazing records I think I ever heard,” Springsteen said, to Kurt Loder, in December 1984, during the second leg of the Born in the U.S.A. tour. “I really love that record.”
Read more: Streets of Philadelphia Sessions isn’t Springsteen's Suicide or another Nebraska, but it’s a pretty fantastic War on Drugs album …
