The recording of Nebraska is as mythical as anything in the lexicon of rock n' roll, approaching folklore, a story that will endure much like Robert Johnson's deal with the Devil or Orpheus's underworld serenades. So it goes: the album, intimate by design, is recorded in near-solitude in an unassuming, rented one-level ranch house in Colts Neck, NJ. Holed up in his bedroom, Bruce Springsteen makes a raw, uncompromising demo filled with bloodcurdling songs about death, despair, sin and (some) redemption — a moment of reckoning captured in the upcoming film Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere (coming to theatres October 24), starring Jeremy Allen White as the artist.
Recorded through a pair of Shure SM57 microphones, an old Gibson Echoplex, a Panasonic boombox for mixing and, notoriously, a Teac Tascom Series 144 4-track cassette recorder, all of which were purchased by Springsteen's guitar technician Mike Batlan, the results end up on a tape that Springsteen's carries around with him in his pocket for months. “Colts Neck,” it reads.
Eventually, he takes the songs to the E Street Band, who try to interpret Springsteen's sparse, tense songs. They fail, and the sessions are scrapped. These won't see the light of day for over 40 years.
There is some controversy as to who first proposed that the tape should be released as-is. Warren Zanes's exhaustive, essential overview, Deliver Me from Nowhere: The Making of Bruce Springsteen's Nebraska, doesn't even definitively identify the hero/culprit. Springsteen and his producer, Jon Landau, both push for it, and they release the album on September 30, 1982. Although there's some tinkering to help with the sonics, the tape is presented to the world pretty much as-is, grainy both outside and in, thus kickstarting the careers of hundreds of bedroom poets and lo-fi miscreants.
In 1989, when Springsteen inducted Bob Dylan into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, he said that the snare shot at the beginning of “Like a Rolling Stone” was a moment so astronomical that it “sounded like somebody kicked open the door to your mind.”
Springsteen continued to describe Dylan's legacy: “The way that Elvis freed your body, Bob freed your mind. He showed us that, just because the music was innately physical, did not mean that it was anti-intellect. He had the vision and the talent to expand a pop song until it could contain the whole world.”
Nebraska did the same for every artist who had a dream to record, to share their songs, but didn't have the necessary funds to enter a professional studio. It turned the bedroom — any bedroom — into a studio.
Even Springsteen's most propulsive and immediate-sounding compositions are just that: compositions. They were gruelling to write and record — “Born to Run” alone took six months to get just right, and the 15-month recording of the titular album almost caused Steven Van Zandt to quit the band. Nebraska, in contrast, has an unadorned immediacy that stands in sharp contrast to even his quietest, most minimal earlier recordings.
Although the recording of Nebraska was cheap and liberating, Springsteen didn't intend for it to be a call to action or a conscious move towards the death of the studio. He just created. What it wrought was inevitable, not intentional. He never meant for the songs on that tape to be released in that form; the plan was always to record it with the E Street Band. The fact that we even get to hear Nebraska is not art or concept: it's lucky providence.
Like many of the best albums, Nebraska‘s songs have been covered, written about, pontificated upon, condemned, reissued, misunderstood and galvanized, and will probably continue to do and be so long after Springsteen has shuffled off this mortal coil. Much like Dylan's snare (played by Bobby Gregg), Springsteen's eerie, weeping harmonica and distant guitar kicked open an unrestrained, lo-fi revolution that proved essential to droves of artists big and small: Bon Iver, Pavement, Guided by Voices, Sebadoh, Daniel Johnston, Neutral Milk Hotel, freak-folk as a whole, the millions of songwriters singing into tape recorders and voice notes, even Zach Bryan, they all exist because of — or at least owe a debt to — this album. It's also not a stretch to think that Lana Del Rey's sultry Americana came from Nebraska‘s frazzled, fractured indictment of the American experience. It's Springsteen, arriving at the darkness on the edge of the USA, peering into the unknown, and stepping into the fray.
Last night I dreamed that I was a child out where the pines grow wild and tall…
The album's songs came out of Springsteen's own disillusionment with the life he'd created for himself. In fact, right after the writing and recording of the album, Springsteen suffered a breakdown (a “depressive crash,” he calls it), and this despair permeates every moment of the record, even its artwork.
Anyone who has ever felt oppressively alone can relate to the austere sights and sounds of Nebraska. A desolate feeling of cold isolation emanates from that David Michael Kennedy photograph, a landscape bruised, grey and slightly out of focus. A vast emptiness causes the listener to disassociate and dissolve into nothingness, into the empty, spectral horizon. Inside, the single image of Springsteen in a hallway, also blurry and out of focus, signifies his self-imposed exile. For these reasons, there will always be something striking about the fragility of Nebraska. It feels like an artist teetering on the edge of himself, his country, his station, his soul, everything.
The album stands in stark contrast against the over-produced artifice of the 1980s, particularly for artists at Springsteen's level. Of course, amazing music came out of the '80s, and with Nebraska, Springsteen wasn't trying to be defiant, raw or authentic; he just was those things. What's black and white and red all over? Nebraska.
There are no pastels or neon colours here — even on “Atlantic City.”
Over the years, the songs have gone through different forms and iterations, but they've always remained poignant and powerful. During his Devils & Dust Tour, he often played “Reason to Believe” as a stomped, ultra-distorted dirge, while on others (including when I saw him in 2008 at the Bell Centre in Montreal), it was presented as a triumphant full-band anthem. Same goes for “Highway Patrolman” and “Atlantic City.” These interpretations prove that, in the desolate haze of Nebraska, joy, elation and hope prevail — words that don't often get associated with that album, but they're all there. You just have to listen close enough.
Much of the discussion around Nebraska has often been hyperbolic and melodramatic, just like Springsteen's music. Part of that has to do with the stories that surround the album, as few modern records have this sort of lore attached to them. The recording, the psyche of its creator, the legacy, it all plays into the mythology.
Although the album has grown in stature over the decades, the response to the album hasn't always been exclusively positive, with some unconvinced by the lore. In fact, both contemporaneous and retrospective reviews have been mixed at times, with the praise and vitriol often contradicting and cancelling each other out.
While some praise the album's minimalist sounds and sparse arrangements, others consider it monotonous and uninspired. Some see its subject matter as overly bleak and repetitive, while others see it as brave, egalitarian and true. Unsurprisingly, neither side ever denies the storytelling to be detailed and expressive; and while some are put off by its overall starkness (perhaps, pretension), others flock towards it.
Still, that name — Springsteen — carried a lot of weight back then, as it still does today, and the album eventually peaking at No. 3 on both the US Billboard 200 and the UK Official Albums Chart stands as an impressive feat for such a difficult and unexpected record.
I got a clear conscience 'bout the things that I done…
In Zanes's book, which director and writer Scott Cooper adapted his upcoming film, Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere, the author offers some “Suggested Resources,” precursors to the album, its themes and topics, and its major influences: Terrence Malick's Badlands, Suicide's “Frankie Teardrop,” Hank Mizell's “Jungle Rock,” Charles Laughton's The Night of the Hunter, Flannery O'Connor's “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” and “Good Country People,” Hank Williams's “A Mansion on the Hill,” Robert Frank's The Americans, and, of course, Bruce Springsteen's first seven studio recordings.
These albums, songs, stories and films — amongst a host of others that Springsteen was consuming at the time — paint a harrowing picture of Springsteen at the beginning of the decade that would go on to define him. The '80s made him one of the biggest American acts of the 20th century (a title he continues to hold today), yet these inspirations played on Springsteen's darker side. But for all of its mystique and mystery, Nebraska is not some impenetrable tome. It's monolithic, but never inaccessible.
What Springsteen did on Nebraska shouldn't have been a shock to anyone. Over the years, he'd been stripping away the hyper-verbosity and maximalism of his earlier releases for increasingly more direct and minimalist prose. Just take a look at the opening couplets from his previous albums:
•“Blinded by the Light” from Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J. (1970)
“Madman drummers bummers and Indians in the summer with a teenage diplomat / In the dumps with the mumps as the adolescent pumps his way into his hat”
• “The E Street Shuffle” from The Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle (1973)
“Sparks fly on E Street when the boy prophets walk it handsome and hot / All the little girls' souls grow weak when the man-child gives them a double shot”
• “Thunder Road” from Born to Run (1975)
“The screen door slams, Mary's dress sways / Like a vision she dances across the porch as the radio plays”
• “Badlands” from Darkness on the Edge of Town (1978)
“Lights out tonight, trouble in the heartland / Got a head-on collision smashing in my guts, man”
“The Ties That Bind” from The River (1980)
“You been hurt and you're all cried out you say / You walk down the street pushing people outta your way”
• “Nebraska” from Nebraska (1982)
“I saw her standing on her front lawn / Just twirling her baton”
The lines consistently get shorter, terser, less impressionistic and more filled with pointed imagery, until they culminate in the most ordinary of images: a young girl practicing her cheerleader moves.
Nebraska is a very American record, its sound and iconography rooted in blues and traditional folk, as well as all those very American aforementioned references. It's thus fitting that the album opens with an image as American as apple pie or baseball. What's not fitting is that the image — one often associated with innocence, camaraderie and celebration — is filled with horror, dread, violence and lust. And it's all because of Springsteen. He chose the lens through which we see this girl: the eyes of a man who eventually killed 11 people — perhaps even with the help of that cheerleader.
Springsteen populates Nebraska with such stories, blunt tales of killers, losers, loners, families, tramps, lovers and monsters, sometimes all in the same song. And yet, the album never becomes about any of these people, at least not in an overall sense. Instead, Nebraska‘s themes and obsessions rest on the audacity of hope. Horror and dread only exist when an inkling of hope exists; otherwise, it's boring and nihilistic. The tragedy for the people of Nebraska is that hope endures, but remains out of reach. Very few albums have the power to disturb and enlighten in equal measure, to cause revulsion and an incomparable swell of emotion, and often simultaneously, like Nebraska does.
The album, for all of its minutia, comprises the simplest, most universal themes and topics: life and death, love and hate, law and chaos, truth and lies. Its preoccupation with futility, also concerns an obsession with second chances and our ability to change, move and disappear for the better. It's more literature than music.
Throughout Nebraska, Springsteen relishes presenting facts as fictions, fictions as facts. He fabricates these fictions — people, places, events, songs — for the images and feelings they evoke. The embellishments are more evocative of the album itself, and not a representation of his actual experiences; hazy remembrances, constructed yet not quite complete.
Through all of its universality, Springsteen also focuses on the banal and the specific, on created references (“as the band played ‘Night of the Johnstown Flood'”) and hyper-specific persons and locales (“Perrineville, barracks No. 8”; “New Jersey Turnpike riding on a wet night / ‘Neath the refinery's glow out where the great black rivers flow”; “Willow bank”; “Michigan Avenue”; “Linden Town”; and of course, Wanda, who worked behind the counter at the Route 60 Bob's Big Boy Fried Chicken).
While this approach may seem like something every artist does, Springsteen's Nebraska intimately and, more importantly, intricately presents them as truths. I never for one second doubted that there was a song out there called “Night of the Johnstown Flood” because Springsteen presents it so clearly, so honestly. There was no reason to question it. There still isn't, and that's a testament to the power of his writing.
Nebraska embodies an elegiac quality, a profundity both sincere and draining. The weight of it all is crushing, brutal, barbaric even, and yet, at the heart of the album, of Springsteen himself, is this need to understand. It is empathy personified, collaborating with ghosts for the sake of knowledge. He has the ability to explore the darkest corners of the psyche — a serial killer, a puzzled man poking a dead dog with a stick, Johnny 99 — without artifice, hyperbole or melodrama, even if all three exist on Nebraska. It's a fascinating balancing act, one that would topple most performers. But not Bruce.
Lookin' down kinda puzzled…
Many of Springsteen's albums and songs possess a kind of romanticized violence (see his first No. 1 album, The River), but on Nebraska, that rose-coloured view turned crimson. The brutality of Suicide's “Frankie Teardrop” famously inspired “State Trooper,” while Mallick's Badlands, with its dreamy retelling of Charles Starkweather's killing spree, offers the most obvious influence for “Nebraska.” Still, Springsteen's account features a much more sinister, even nauseating, Starkweather and plenty of unsettling imagery, most notably the song's conclusion, where Starkweather requests that his baby be seated on his lap after he's placed in the electric chair.
In Springsteen's capable hands, the album becomes inhabited by people, not characters; he has affection for them, and because of this, it becomes remarkably simple to connect with these individuals. Springsteen certainly did, and always without judgment, portraying these people and events in vivid, videographic detail.
Almost every song on Nebraska uses the pronoun “I,” sometimes repeatedly (when the narrator is Springsteen), sometimes only once (“Johnny 99,” when Springsteen, for a brief moment, embodies the titular Johnny). But there's one outlier: on the album's most uplifting song, “Reason to Believe,” the characters suffer and crumble, just like on all the others, yet here, they also persevere, pushing on, beating back the pain and failure with all their might and grace. The song reminds me of the final words in The Great Gatsby from another one of America's great writers, F. Scott Fitzgerald:
“Tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther… And one fine morning — So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”
The novel explores the trials and tribulations — and ultimately, the impossibility — of the American Dream, a dream perpetuated in American culture while remaining incomprehensible and insurmountable. It's a dream that promises, if you work hard enough, try hard enough, sacrifice hard enough, that nothing is impossible, that you will reach above your stature and status. Yet this dream is not afforded to everyone. In fact, it's a dream which is actively suppressed in many.
Springsteen's music was never idealistic, even if it was optimistic. In this respect, it's not profound to call Nebraska bleak, uncompromising or dark, because it is all those things. This lack of hope results squarely from the inherent hopelessness of believing in the American Dream; Gatsby died for it, and so do many of the folks in Springsteen's songs.
Similarly, Springsteen was heavily influenced by the works of Flannery O'Connor, a towering literary figure who channeled the unsentimental South in books like Wise Blood, using her upbringing and experiences to examine the brittle boundaries between morality, grace, sin and redemption. Influenced by her Catholic upbringing, O'Connor was profoundly humanist, managing to explore the edges that define us with nuance and compassion. Springsteen, no stranger to this idea (see his entire discography, before and after Nebraska), took his yearning for empathy and drama and injected the songs of Nebraska with that same hard-earned literary approach. It's empathy, presented without a shred of saccharine sentimentality, that's also neither frivolous nor callous. It is concerned.
While there are impressions of Springsteen himself in these songs — particularly on “Mansion on the Hill,” “Used Car” and “My Father's House” — “Reason to Believe” entirely concerns other people. It's not autobiographical, loosely or otherwise, like the three aforementioned tracks, nor is it Springsteen taking on the nuanced guise of another, like all the other songs. Instead, Springsteen appears as an observer, one who, at the very end, when a glimmer of that elusive hope appears, removes himself from the equation. He fails to connect, fails to comprehend.
This is why there is no “I” in “Reason to Believe.” The song contains a “me,” but that “me” associates with an outsider. He is incredulous, a “me” who doesn't understand how, at the end of every hard-earned day, people find some reason to believe. A “me” removed and disassociated from the world and the people in it. A “me” that reinforces Springsteen's seclusion, his fear and his failure.
In “Reason to Believe,” Springsteen doesn't see himself as worthy of salvation, nor does he see himself as salvation, which means neither should anyone else. He absolves himself of the burden of sacrifice because he doesn't represent the solution to anyone's problems; he's not the saviour. Christ, he's not even a saviour. He's not sacrificing himself for you: he is you. In fact, he's worse — and worse off — than you.
Regardless of the fame and money and status, at the end of Nebraska, Springsteen stands as more lost, broken and self-loathing than any of us. He needs to exorcize himself for the same reason we all do: to be free of the burden of the past. Nebraska is that exorcism, and on “Reason to Believe,” there is nothing to hide behind, no one to rely on, nothing to protect him. He's all alone, with his instruments and his ghosts. The echo turns him into the solitary spectre he believes he's become, an ethereal shell, floating out of the speakers, hollow, distant and disembodied.
And yet Nebraska, for all its darkness, also ends up filling Springsteen with blood, bone and heart. Nebraska saves Springsteen. It renews him, gives him life. It is his salvation and catharsis; and when you listen to it, it becomes yours as well. It connects us to him more than any other one of his albums because, in its vulnerability and aggression, it is all of us.
Nebraska, from its artwork to its words to its sound, is isolated. Through that distance, it somehow manages to put us in that passenger seat on the cover. We are there with Springsteen, riding with him in that brand new used car through the lonely plains. We turn on the radio: Roy Orbison singing for the lonely. It's cold but perfect. We settle in and through Nebraska, we ride together. Inescapable and divine, it is a lifeline to connection.
In that respect, he'll never be alone again, and neither will we.
Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere, starring Jeremy Allen White and Jeremy Strong, is in theatres October 24. Tickets are available now.
