Bruce Springsteen’s The Seeger Sessions had been creating a buzz in music circles even before it was released. It’s not because it’s a Springsteen album or that it’s an acoustic album. Springsteen did that already with his Nebraska album in the mid-1980s. Intended only as a means of remembering the new songs he was writing, Springsteen sat with a 4-track, his guitar and harmonica, and recorded a series of haunting tales of desperate people. Value was found in those naked recordings and an acoustic album was released.

This latest work also flies in the face of technology, though it is being released on one of the most innovative techniques around. A DualDisc, The Seeger Sessions has an audio album on one side of the disc (that can play on most machines but not all) and a DVD on the other side that has a 30 minute documentary about the making of the album, the entire audio album in enhanced PCM stereo, and two bonus tracks. The DVD album is far superior in audio quality if played through the speakers of a stereo television.

But it is the content and the method that content was laid down that is so amazing. Recorded on three separate days in three different years (1997, 2005, and 2006), The Seeger Sessions is Springsteen’s attempt to discover the folk process. From a generation that grew up during the great folk revival of the 1960's of which Pete Seeger, for whom the album is named, was a major contributor, Springsteen missed that experience by his total immersion in rock and roll. Yet, it was his recording of “We Shall Overcome” in a tribute album called Where Have All The Flowers Gone: The Songs Of Pete Seeger in 1997 that planted the seeds for this current recording.

That 2-disc album brought a disparate group together to sing the songs that had so captured Pete Seeger’s heart for decades. Noted folkies like Odetta, Judy Collins, Sweet Honey in the Rock, Richie Havens, Guy Davis, John Gorka, and Roger McGuinn of the Byrds were expected contributors. But thrown into that acoustic ballad mix were Tommy Sands, Jackson Browne & Bonnie Raitt, Bruce Cockburn, Billy Bragg, and the Indio Girls. And who would have expected radio veteran Studs Terkel to add his signature voice to the tribute. Springsteen’s part of the album was a slick but subdued version of “We Shall Overcome.” That cut appears on The Seeger Sessions because from it sprung the richness of this new musical experiment.

In order to do that one cut, Springsteen used traditional players brought to him by Soozie Tyrell, the violinist in Springsteen’s E-Street Band. That also brought Springsteen into a whole new realm of musical experience. Eight years later, armed with a selection of Seeger favorites, Springsteen sequestered a dozen musicians and himself in his farmhouse in the country and started recording. With no rehearsals and only background vocal overdubs, Springsteen set about not just to record music but to make music in the folk tradition. The DVD documentary shows Springsteen orchestrating the arrangements of some of the songs, telling a violinist to play a gypsy phrase that he scats out to him or calling out to the horns (trumpet, trombone, saxophone, and tuba) to each take a turn at a few measures of something else. It is as if Springsteen hears it all in his head before he begins singing and recording.

What is created is a rich tapestry of sound that ranges from moments of bare bones vocal with an accordion and guitar to full flat out Cajun-laced, Western barroom ruckus. Only 13 songs long, and begging for more, the album shows the obvious enjoyment with which Springsteen and his crew approached the whole process. We don’t see the rock megastar we have come to think of as Bruce Springsteen, but an older, more mellow musician who is rediscovering the roots of the very rock and roll he’s been playing all these years. He says in the video that they are using “true folk instruments meant for travel, meant to be played in and out of people’s lives.”

Take “Erie Canal.” This is a song we all learned in grade school. It’s mildly interesting for its place in history, the way a song can encapsulate a part of a culture. Here, though, we see the song develop as layers of instrumentation is laid down until it has been elevated to a musical experience. Springsteen says, “When you’re fumbling around, opportunity and disaster are close at hand.”

“Eyes on the Prize” begins with a solo banjo and is joined by some of the most haunting background vocals I’ve ever heard. Then, it fills with a layer of violin and horns into a New Orleans funeral dirge.

But, it is “Mary Don’t You Weep” that is the showpiece of the album. Again, not a song to turn your head, but Springsteen elicits a gypsy mournfulness from one of the violinists and we see the piece move into a little Cajun accordion and then into Dixieland horns. The full-harmonied church ending would have been enough, but the piece fades back to the gypsy fiddle, leaving the listener with so much more than a sweet little folk tune.

Springsteen says that he and the musicians are “re-contexualizing a song.” In other words, they are finding the life of a song again.

That is most evident on “Shenandoah.” There is that ambient fiddle similar to that of Jay Unger’s Civil War anthem, along with heart-in-throat backups and a moody feel about the whole piece. The photo quality of this section on the DVD has a worn quality to it, underlining the mournfulness of the song. It feels as if you were catching a moment in history with Springsteen and his musicians that was deeply profound. A sorrowful connection drips from the piece as if watching a documentary on a struggling people that you could really relate to.

Some of the songs on the album have had their traditional melodies tinkered with by Springsteen. But that’s the nature of the folk idiom. It is for the maker of music to make them what he or she will. “Mrs. McGrath” and “Jesse James” are probably better songs for that tinkering.

The two bonus audio tracks on the DVD were correctly left out of the finished album. They are rough and unpolished and not fully acceptable for a produced album. Yet, the richness in them is why they were included as bonus tracks. “Buffalo Gals” starts quietly with Springsteen speaking the words more than singing. Then, it breaks into this drunken vocal free-for-all that’s supported by drums, horns, and a tuba!. “How Can I Keep From Singing” is an attempt at a church choir accompanied by the drone of an accordion.

The Seeger Sessions is a wonderful experiment in the spontaneity of making music. Do it again!