Song of the Day: Bruce Springsteen, "Maybe I Don't Know You"

Last week, Bruce Springsteen dropped the long-awaited Tracks II: The Lost Albums, a sorta sequel to the box set Tracks that came out in 1998. While the original Tracks was an odd-and-sods collection culled from a bunch of different corners of the Boss’ recording career, Tracks II is actually seven fully-realized albums that Springsteen wrote, recorded, mixed and mastered and then stuck in a drawer for one reason or another. Some bands struggle to create that many records, but Springsteen has thrown that many away (and has even more—during the promotion for Tracks II, he announced the already-completed Tracks III is forthcoming).

They can’t all be zingers, even if you’re a cosmic supernova of talent like Springsteen, so a bunch of the stuff on Tracks II is interesting without being particularly good (I can’t imagine ever circling back to the vaguely loungey Twilight Hours, but I’m glad I got to hear it). But there are stunners included in there, particularly the punchy L.A. Garage Sessions ‘83, the Ghost of Tom Joad mirror session Somewhere North of Nashville, and the synth-heavy bedroom pop of Streets of Philadelphia Sessions.

The 1990s were weird for Springsteen: He opened them in full adult contemporary mode, then did the minimalist Tom Joad album and spent the back half of the decade doing nostalgia stuff (in addition to Tracks, he also put out a greatest hits compilation). In between all that he also won himself an Oscar for the song “Streets of Philadelphia,” a moody bit of keyboard soul that became one of his biggest hits. As the story goes, Springsteen had been dabbling in drum machines and other types of electronic instruments, and he became enamored of the ability to record something that was entirely self-contained that also pushed him outside of his comfort zone. So he ended up producing an entire album’s worth of songs like “Streets of Philadelphia,” a series of after-hours keyboard throbs and restless confessions that brushed up against trip-hop and kind of invented Lorde in the process. “Maybe I Don’t Know You” is, musically, a pretty straightforward loop, but Springsteen’s vocal is sharp and desperate (I just straight up love the actual sound quality of his voice in this era).

Streets of Philadelphia Sessions would have landed some time in 1994, and if I were to retroactively rank it I would probably place it in my top 10 just below classics like Beck’s Odelay, Nine Inch Nails’ The Downward Spiral and Hole’s Live Through This. It probably wouldn’t have been embraced by the rock world at the time, but it’s that good.