Tracks:
- Blind Spot [3:35] (released 4/17/2025) LF
- Maybe I Don’t Know You [4:24]
- Something in the Well [4:24] LF
- Waiting on the End of the World [4:35] LF
- The Little Things [3:26]
- We Fell Down [4:31]
- One Beautiful Morning [4:26]
- Between Heaven and Earth [4:33]
- Secret Garden [4:00] (4/11/95, 19 US, 66 CB, 5 AC, 12 A40, 17 UK, 7 CN, 9 AU) 95,B1,B2
- Farewell Party [4:09]
Also from This Era:
- Streets of Philadelphia (2/2/94, 9 US, 6 CB, 3 AC, 25 AR, 2 UK, 1CN, 4 AU) 95,E03,C,E15,B1,B2
- Back in Your Arms [4:35] (recorded 1/12/1995) T1
- Brothers Under the Bridge ‘95 [4:55] (recorded 5/22/1995) T1,18
- Blood Brothers 95
- Missing (1995, The Crossing Guard soundtrack) E03
<About the Album:
“Next to Electric Nebraska, this is what everyone’s been waiting for…We’ve long known about this album, though details were often scrambled. It’d be referenced as the ‘hip hop album,’ ‘the relationship album,’ Waiting on the End of the World” SG “or his ‘loops album’, his ‘electronica’ album.” MJ It was the whole album of material in the vein of Streets of Philadelphia and Secret Garden, for some reason buried despite the massive success of those tracks.” SG
In 1994, Bruce Springsteen contributed ‘Streets of Philadelphia’ to Jonathan Demme’s 1993 film Philadelphia. The song won an Oscar for Best Original Song and a case can be made that the song “saved Bruce Springsteen’s career.” MJ After the E Street Band broke up in 1989, Springsteen came back with Human Touch and Lucky Town, a pair of albums released simultaneously in 1992, but they received some of the most lackluster reviews of his career.
“Streets” was Springsteen’s first foray into drum loops. He found that their rhythmic element allowed him to write songs on keyboards and synthesizers instead of guitar. NPR In 1994, with the help of engineer Toby Scott, he crafted some loops SP that let him explore “the rhythms of mid-1990s contemporary music, and particularly West Coast hip-hop.” SP
“By the end of the summer of 1994, he was ready to record.” NPR He performed the songs mostly on his own at his Los Angeles home studio but did get some help from his wife Patti Scialfa, Soozie Tyrell, and Lisa Lowell – all of whom had been part of his touring band from 1992 to ’93. SP
Thematically, the material “explores doubt and betrayal in relationships.” SP As he said, “That was just the theme that I locked in on at that moment…I don’t really know why. Patti and I, we were having a great time in California. But sometimes if you lock into one song you like, then you follow that thread.” SP
The album was completed and set for release in the spring of 1995. NPR However, Springsteen said, “It never felt finished to me” NPR and “I was experimenting with a genre usually outside my wheelhouse.” MJ He was also concerned that “it would have been the fourth ‘really dark’ record about relationships in a row, which ‘I didn’t know if the audience was ready for.’” NPR
Springsteen turned his attention instead to an E Street Band reunion, their first time working together in seven years. They reconvened in the studio to work on bonus tracks for his Greatest Hits album. He said, “Well, maybe it’s time to just do something with the band or remind the fans of the band or that part of my work life…So that’s where we went. But I always really liked Streets of Philadelphia Sessions…during the Broadway show, I thought of putting it out [as a standalone release]. I always put them away, but I don’t throw them away.” SP
It “stayed on the shelf, accruing mythical status simply from the fact that no one had heard it.” MJ That changed in 2025 when it was released as part of the Tracks II: The Lost Albums box set. “At the risk of suggesting that one of the greatest rock artists of all time got it wrong, the material on SOPS is of such high calibre you have to suspect Bruce’s fans would have coped just fine.” MJ This is a “missing chapter that explains part of the main story. The seeming lack of productivity in the ’90s wasn’t that Springsteen wasn’t working, or that he didn’t have the muse, but that he was unsure of various genre experiments.” SG
“From the perspective of 30 years on, this is not the sound of commercial suicide but an artist re-connecting with the pure motives that always drove his greatest work.” MJ This album “sounds like a lost classic, but you could imagine how it may have further muddled a confusing ’90s for Springsteen. How would listeners have made sense of this then? Calling it Springsteen’s easy-listening album?” SG
“Of course, it is not that.” SG “The greyscale synth textures and reedy vocal melodies almost make it like a missing link between works as disparate as Tunnel of Love and The Ghost of Tom Joad. Or that the grain of Springsteen’s voice against atmospheric smears and gently thrumming drum programming recalls the Blue Nile’s tension between late-night lived-in humanity and alien soundscapes.” SG
“This album feels like the end of an arc begun with Tunnel of Love, with a handful of striking ballads and songs like Something in the Well, where you can hear strains of a straight-up acoustic Springsteen song rendered against a hissing, festering backdrop. The synths throughout are ambient – far from the glimmering leads of his ’80s recordings. If this had come out in 1994, it may have confounded Springsteen fans. But it would’ve lived on as a touchstone for all of his artier-minded acolytes and progeny, just like Nebraska.” SG
“A clutch of these songs would surely have impacted comparably to his Oscar-winning single. The opening track, Blind Spot, for instance, built around what sounds like a stock hip-hop sample, or the creepy Maybe I Don’t Know You, with Shane Fontayne’s needling guitar flecks, have a similar cold intensity to the best songs on Tunnel of Love.” MJ
“Then there’s Waiting on the End of the World: Springsteen actually recorded this song with the E Street Band at the January 1995 session, and a subsequently leaked version made clear why he thought the song’s insistent waves of tension and release would suit his erstwhile group. Yet his 1994 original is even better, combining siren doom with epic pop smarts to amplify the lyric’s despairing evocation of a consumptive relationship: ‘We loved each other like a disease.’” MJ
“One Beautiful Morning, meanwhile, breaks with the musical framework with the addition of ‘other band’ drummer Zach Alford and Bassist Tommy Sims, plus Patti Scialfa and soon-to-be E Street Band member Soozie Tyrell for euphoric R.E.M.-like arpeggiations around more lyrical darkness (‘No one really knows what happens when someone dies’).” MJ
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