Bruce Springsteen - Nebraska

So much of Nebraska’s magic is the context. In the mid-winter of 1981, Bruce Springsteen was one of the biggest rock stars in the world, coming off the road after a typically huge set of live dates to support his vast double album The River (1980), itself following the iconic late seventies double hit of Born to Run (1975) and Darkness on the Edge of Town (1978). The point we make, Springsteen and his E Street Band were really big stuff. But, The Boss would end up spending that winter in relative isolation at a rented house in Colts Neck, New Jersey, with just a TASCAM 144 four-track cassette recorder for company. He was recording demos for what he expected eventually to record with the E Street Band, and that is both the start and ultimately the end of the Nebraska story. He nailed something extraordinary the first time, he just didn’t know it yet…

The recordings he made were demos and were never intended to be anything else. No huge band, no roaring guitars, no Born to Run-style grandeur. Just voice, guitar, harmonica, tape hiss and some extraordinarily dark stories. There is even some amount of great luck that disaster didn’t strike as the legend goes that he carried the demo tape around in his pocket for weeks. He would subsequently make studio recordings with the full band, but they never managed to reproduce the strange intimacy and atmosphere of the home recordings. Springsteen would also try recording the material himself in a conventional studio, but those attempts similarly failed to capture what was present on the original cassette. So the eventual solution was an extraordinary one (again, he was becoming one of the biggest rock artists on the planet), as his ‘sketches’ were given to engineer Chuck Plotkin who worked with what he had to prepare the cassette tape recordings for a full release.

And that is Nebraska. 

The album opener and title track recounts the story of Charles Starkweather and Caril Ann Fugate, the teenage couple responsible for a notorious 1958 killing spree in Nebraska and Wyoming (also the inspiration for Terrence Malick’s outstanding 1973 film Badlands). The album starts dark and those clouds never fully lift. Nebraska is populated by criminals, desperate workers, failing relationships, troubled families, lonely travellers and people struggling to find some kind of meaning. Rarely, however are the album's characters presented simply as heroes or villains, Springsteen instead often allows them to tell their own stories, leaving the listener to sit with their choices and experiences. Life is full of nuance and duality, and Nebraska paints it in gritty blacks and whites.  

Although the Nebraska story is always intrinsically linked to its technical beginnings, there are few albums released in the last forty-four years that come close to the dark power of the album. It contains brilliant songs and brilliant performances. Nebraska is about moral ambiguity and what resonates with one listener will be totally different to what resonates with another. There is little judgement and little redemption, it’s just stories and it’s pretty magical stuff.