A "lost album" that still feels not quite fully "found" - Poole on STREETS OF PHILADELPHIA SESSIONS

July 25, 2025

So what exactly is the deal here? Springsteen fans who've been paying enough attention for long enough have known about the legendary hip-hop-influenced "loops album" for years... decades, even. We also have heard repeatedly about just how close it was to being released in the spring of 1995. "I finished it," says Bruce Springsteen himself in one of his latest versions of a fairly frequently told story, this one featured in Thom Zimny's short film Inside Tracks II: The Lost Albums, "Bob Clearmountain mixed it... and I didn't put it out," he adds with a chuckle.

So if this indeed is that album at last, released in the same complete form that was intended for release thirty years ago, why on Earth would it have been called Streets of Philadelphia Sessions, yet not include a version of the hit 1994 song "Streets of Philadelphia" on it? And if the plan truly was to release an album entitled Streets of Philadelphia Sessions without "Streets of Philadelphia" on it, why would the album packaging have used no photography other than a set of Neal Preston's shots from the 1993 filming of the "Streets of Philadelphia" music-video?

Instead, this 2025 release feels very much like a retitled, shortened, and/or otherwise altered version of what was intended for release back in Spring 1995. That wouldn't be such a big deal, of course, if folks in the Springsteen camp, including Springsteen himself, hadn't repeatedly indicated that we fans finally would get to hear his full "loops"/"relationship" album in what was intended to be its finalized 1995 version, as - to quote Springsteen archivist Erik Flannigan in the book The Lost Albums included with vinyl-LP/CD versions of Tracks II: The Lost Albums - "a cornerstone of The Lost Albums."

In any case, and more important, what is on Streets of Philadelphia Sessions just doesn't sound as groundbreaking or exciting as it might have sounded decades ago, if it ever did. First off, those legendary loops are prominent parts in only half of the tracks on this version of the album: "Blind Spot," "Maybe I Don't Know You," "We Fell Down," "Between Heaven And Earth," and "Secret Garden." And it's actually only on "Blind Spot" where the looping - combined with the sound of a male shout repeatedly sampled à la Rob Base and DJ EZ Rock's 1988 hip-hop classic "It Takes Two" - still feels like a radical rhythmic departure from most, if not all, of Springsteen's other musical moves. On the remaining tracks, the loops simply provide synthesized drumming beds that aren't that different from the drumming sound and the role it has played on many other Springsteen tracks. In "Maybe I Don't Know You," for example, there's not much sonic distance between that track's drum sound and the one to be found on, say, "Brilliant Disguise."

This album's version of "Secret Garden," which remains one of Springsteen's most beautiful, moving, and mature "relationship" songs, doesn't sound anywhere near as fully realized - or as good - as the 1995 E Street Band version recorded for Greatest Hits, featuring Clarence Clemons' gorgeous closing sax solo. Clearly the choice to make that version the first officially released one was correct, especially since it eventually became Bruce's final top-40 hit in the U.S. to date, peaking at number 19 on Billboard's Hot 100, with renewed interest in the track after it was featured in the soundtrack of the film Jerry Maguire. (Incidentally, although Shane Fontayne is credited for his guitar work on the Streets of Philadelphia Sessions version of "Secret Garden," after repeated listenings I have yet to hear any evidence of it.)

While the lyrical perspective here often maturely explores the darker and more complex aspects of love - and a few do it rather well, leading to effective, at least artistically and musically interesting tracks like "Blind Spot," "Waiting On The End Of The World," and "Between Heaven and Earth" - it's not like Springsteen wasn't doing that already on previously released material like Tunnel of Love, Human Touch, and Lucky Town, the three officially released albums that directly preceded his work on this material. And something like the beautifully heartbreaking and soulful Human Touch outtake "Trouble In Paradise," co-written with Roy Bittan and featured more than a quarter-century ago on the first Tracks box-set, goes just as deep and dark lyrically as this long-anticipated material, even without layers of foreboding synthesizer sounds attached to it. It's just more than a bit ironic and amusing that some who seemed so cool to such emotionally mature material in the past now appear so gaga over what's to be found here on Streets of Philadelphia Sessions.

It's also rather mind-boggling that in 1995 "Bruce, Inc." came so close to officially releasing an album in which Bruce Springsteen sings a line comparing a relationship to being "like... a disease" not once, not twice, but thrice in separate tracks among only ten such selections presented here: "Blind Spot," "Waiting On The End Of The World," and "The Farewell Party." It's one thing to have left alone the repeated "deliver me from nowhere" line (in both "State Trooper" and "Open All Night") on Nebraska, especially since attempting later to alter a sung line in the demo source recordings that became Nebraska would have been extremely difficult if not impossible to pull off successfully, given the technology involved. But the recording technology that Springsteen was using for the material on Streets of Philadelphia Sessions, more than a decade after the recording of Nebraska, would've made it very easy to add a different phrase or line to a song, avoiding such heavy repetition. I guess Bruce just thought that "like...a disease" phrase was among his best songwriting accomplishments ever. (Sorry, Boss; it isn't.)

Ironically, the biggest standout for me on Streets of Philadelphia Sessions is a track that has absolutely no drum loops or any other kind of hip-hop influence. "One Beautiful Morning" is instead a rocker about the tragic death of a beloved woman (coincidentally with yet another lyrical reference to another unnamed "disease,") and how those she left behind will carry on without her. I wouldn't be surprised at all if, like "Streets of Philadelphia," the spirit of Kristen Ann Carr also lives in this song. I would be equally unsurprised to learn that Bruce pulled the "promises to keep" phrase in "One Beautiful Morning" from the "promises to keep" phrase that he added to the closing line in his version of Harry Chapin's "Remember When The Music." In any case, "One Beautiful Morning" is one beautiful, moving, and powerful song, among the finest that Bruce Springsteen has ever written and recorded, and I'm so glad that it's been released officially at last. Play it... loud.