Accordingly, the most essential music is rarely the most familiar, although the blast of harmonica and acoustic guitar that introduces “Under a Big Sky,” an atmospheric highlight on the 1995 country set Somewhere North of Nashville, hits like the scent from an old friend’s childhood home drifting along the breeze. You can see why some of Perfect World, a sturdy set of mid-tempo rock songs compiled specifically for this box set, might have been passed over for more distinctive material from its era. And you can see why Somewhere North of Nashville—a lighthearted collection that includes a cover song (Johnny Rivers’ “Poor Side of Town”), several countrified renditions of Born in the U.S.A. B-sides (my favorite: “Janey Don’t You Lose Heart”), and a silly suite of rockabilly rave-ups called “Repo Man,” “Detail Man,” and “Delivery Man”—stayed on the shelf at a pivotal moment in his career.
Other albums play like emotional breakthroughs. This is where Streets of Philadelphia Sessions comes in. While the music is a triumph—more tender and tuneful than I expected—it also carries the sense of an artist writing himself out of a rut. After a critical and commercial low point in the early ’90s, Springsteen tried to ride the momentum of his Oscar-winning song for the 1993 legal drama Philadelphia, writing further character studies to expand its tragic love story of devotion and decay. In “One Beautiful Morning,” he builds a refrain from a simple vow: “We give our hearts to mystery.” Across several tracks, he tests a lyric comparing love to a disease, dreams of flying but realizes he’s crawling, searches for a lost part of himself in someone’s eyes and winds up feeling more broken. Maybe he was concerned about how this material would be interpreted by his fan base—or his family. It only adds to his tension that these uncharacteristic scenes of a mid-life crisis were shelved at the last minute for an E Street reunion and a lean, mean, 6x platinum Greatest Hits set.
That particular Greatest Hits, as it happens, would become my gateway to Springsteen fandom as a kid in the late ’90s. Since then, I’ve steadily turned to his work for meaning and guidance and shaped my life around a love of music. Would I have followed this same path if he swapped that welcoming overview for this dark unburdening? It’s impossible to say. But I do know that, 30 years later, it’s hitting the spot. The songs I keep coming back to are “The Farewell Party”—a poignant ballad offering dreams of transfiguration and “a life somewhere untouched by our failures”—and “Maybe I Don’t Know You.” That one’s a little simpler: a creeping rocker with a punching-bag drum loop that reminded me of Godflesh the first time I heard it. Across three verses, Springsteen draws noirish drama from a doomed romance, shadowed by changes he can’t put his finger on yet. “Is it something new?/Or just something you always hid?” he asks before reaching the chorus: “Maybe I don’t know you like I thought I did.” Once the initial novelty wears off of this strange, sprawling treasure trove of music, the real revelation begins to surface: After all this time, maybe we’re still just getting to know each other.
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