Bruce Springsteen’s Best ’90s Album, Long Buried, Is Finally Coming Out Next Week
Tommy Sims plays bass on six songs as do his bandmates Zack Alford (drums) and Shane Fontayne (guitar); “One Beautiful Morning” features backing vocals from Scialfa, Soozie Tyrell and Lisa Lowell. But most of the music is just Bruce on Korg and Yamaha keys, guitars present but not dominating the conversation, every song built on top of rudimentary drum loops, some of them programmed by Springsteen’s engineer Toby Scott, a few sampled from over-the-counter hip-hop beat CDs—a version of what present-day producers would call a “sample pack.” If you’ve ever longed to hear Bruce Springsteen sing over the drum break from Dexter Wansel’s 1976 “Theme From the Planets,” a beat that is also in Eric B. and Rakim’s “I Ain’t No Joke”—and one that Springsteen got to a year before the Chemical Brothers used it on “Leave Home,” my guy was out there in Bel Air digging in those crates—this is an album where that happens, delightfully, on “Between Heaven and Earth.”
Mostly, though, Springsteen treats these as lo-fi hip-hop beats to worry over. There’s an early version here of “Secret Garden,” the one that became a top 20 hit three years later as the you-complete-me theme from Jerry Maguire. But the rest of the album picks up where Tunnel of Love’s uneasy relationship song “Brilliant Disguise” left off, in the wee hours where you wonder if the fortune teller lied, in the darkness on the edge of commitment. “What’s that dress you’re wearing, baby? I’ve never seen that dress before,” our narrator asks, just one line into “Maybe I Don’t Know You,” already sounding like a film-noir sap about to be clubbed from behind. In the oddly tender cheating song “The Little Things,” someone slips into infidelity like a warm bath, too weary to fight back that hard—the story starts, “She said we could just sleep together, there’d be nothing wrong” and fades out on “She stuck her tongue in my mouth.”
The first half of the album in particular sounds enough like Tunnel of Divorce that you can see why Bruce might not have been itching to get it out there. He’s quoted in Erik Flannigan’s liner-note essay for the album emphasizing that “me and Patti [Scialfa, his wife then and now] were having a great time in California” when these songs were written. “But sometimes if you lock into one song you like”—in this case, Springsteen says, it was the grim “Blind Spot,” about a couple who “inhabited each other / Like it was some kind of disease,” a metaphor that shows up three more times on this record—“then you follow that thread.”
Uncertain about following up Tunnel of Love, Human Touch, and Lucky Town by asking listeners to rock with yet another album about the existential exigencies of midlife—and a much darker one, preoccupied with doubt and faithlessness—Springsteen held off on releasing this one. Before long he’d reassembled the E Streeters to cut bonus tracks for a greatest-hits album, including the full-band version of “Secret Garden,” then moved on to The Ghost of Tom Joad. And this even-more-secret garden of ur-’90s keyboard tones and fizzy canned beats sat in the vault until next week, when it will finally be accessible to a world whose frame of reference is now prepared for its overall vibe thanks to the work of everyone from Moby to Amen Dunes.
A box set containing seven new/old Springsteen albums is a lot of art to process, so I will not pretend to have an opinion yet about the rest of Tracks II, including L.A. Garage Sessions ’83 (home demos for a Nebraska follow-up, put aside in favor of Born in the U.S.A.) to Inyo (quasi-concept album about the US-Mexican border) to Faithless (soundtrack to an apparently unmade “spiritual Western” film whose details Springsteen has not shared). I have been too busy rocking with this, the sound of Bruce alone (spiritually if not literally) with nothing but the keys, the breaks, and the feels. I regret to inform every other band that’s putting out a record this year that they may have already lost the dad-rock arms race to a 75-year-old.
