Without Nebraska, Bruce Springsteen might not be who he is today. The natural follow-up to Springsteen’s hugely successful album The River should have been the hit-packed Born in the U.S.A. But instead, in 1982, he came out with an album consisting of a series of dark songs he had recorded by himself, for himself.
But more than forty years later, Nebraska is arguably Springsteen’s most important record—the lasting clue to understanding not just his career as an artist and the vision behind it, but also the man himself.
Nebraska is rough and unfinished, recorded on cassette tape with a simple four-track recorder by Springsteen, alone in his bedroom, just as the digital future was announcing itself.
And yet Springsteen now considers it his best album. Nebraska expressed a turmoil that was reflective of the mood of the country, but it was also a symptom of trouble in the artist’s life, the beginnings of a mental breakdown that Springsteen would only talk about openly decades after the album’s release.
"I had only been home a month, and I started writing all those songs. I wrote them really quickly. Two months for the whole record, and for me that's a very short time. I'd sit at my desk, and this thing it was fascinating. It was one of those cases where you almost didn't think about it. You work at it, but you do something you didn't imagine yourself doing. I knew I wanted to make a certain type of record, but I certainly hadn't planned it."
Something remarkable happened with "Mansion on the Hill," and it wasn't the first time. Springsteen took an existing title and built another song around it. Of course he didn't steal "Hey Jude" or "Night Moves". Springsteen's appropriation set foot in a particular past, a more remote and unmistakably Southern past, in which much American music had found its personality and aspirations. He had already done it once with “Wreck on the Highway”, on THE RIVER.
Zanes interviews Springsteen at length: and he makes him speak by accepting his reticence and also using his silences or monosyllabic answers as very eloquent moments, more effective than any comment.
He recalls the context from which a series of demos took shape, recorded in his rented house at the time, in Colts Neck, New Jersey, with guitar and vocals on a four-track TEAC 144.
They were then taped onto any tape that Bruce would give to Jon Landau without the case and still wearing the lint from the pocket where he kept it.
The friend and manager was worried, on a human level, by listening to lyrics that were punches and sounds that were raw and cutting, imbued with the dark influence of "Badlands" by Terrence Malick (a 1973 film shot around crimes heinous by Charles Starkweather) and dry as the prose of Flannery O'Connor.
Warren Zanes spoke to many people involved with making Nebraska, including Bruce Springsteen himself. He also interviewed more than a dozen celebrated artists and musical insiders, from Rosanne Cash to Steven Van Zandt, about their reactions to the album.
Zanes interweaves these conversations with inquiries into the myriad cultural touchpoints, including Terrence Malick’s Badlands and the short stories of Flannery O’Conner, that influenced Springsteen as he was writing the album’s haunting songs.
The result is a textured and revelatory account of not only a crucial moment in the career of an icon but also a record that upended all expectations and predicted a home-recording revolution.
