Bruce Springsteen Nebraska (1982)

From consequence.net

In this week’s edition of Dusting ‘Em Off, staff writers Henry Hauser and Bryant Kitching revisit Bruce Springsteen’s dark and intimate 1982 sixth album, Nebraska. The two discuss its role in Springsteen’s disocgraphy, the stories behind the songs, the production style, and whether or not the New Jersey hero let go of hope.

Bryant Kitching (BK): By 1982, Bruce Springsteen was wholly free from the heavy legal shackles that had plagued him for the better part of the last decade. For the first time in his career, he could do whatever the hell he wanted, and his label or lawyers couldn’t say a damn thing. What does The Boss do with that freedom? Inspired by Charles Starkweather’s 1957-58 killing spree, he churned out Nebraska, one of the darkest, most macabre, utterly heart-wrenching albums of all time. Sandwiched between two stadium-sized rock monoliths, The River (1980) and Born in the USA (1984), that’s what we in the business like to call punk as fuck. It’s why it has always been my favorite Springsteen album and an album worth revisiting.

I think back to the photo of Bruce on the inside sleeve. It’s a fuzzy, distant shot that looks like the photographer snuck up on him while he was creeping around his abandoned childhood home in Freehold, NJ. It couldn’t be further from the smiling boardwalk goofball on the Born To Run cover, or the take-no-prisoners tough guy from The River. Nebraska oozes mystery and chaos while buckling your knees and wetting your eyes.

Henry Hauser (HH): It’s absolutely true that Nebraska stands in stark contrast to Bruce’s earlier work. Nebraska leaves behind the youthful exuberance of Greetings from Asbury Park, the bustling friskiness of The Wild, the Innocent and the E Street Shuffle, and that delirious high of ditching “a town full of losers” anchoring Born To Run. What’s left is a requiem – a Mourner’s Kaddish for all those wretched souls too timid, too dumb, or shackled with just too much rotten luck to make it out of the “dead man’s town” where they were born and bred.

Nebraska finds Bruce’s rambunctious ragamuffin pals Sloppy Sue, Big Bones Billy, and Bad Scooter a decade down the line, still languishing in the suffocating towns from which they swore they’d escape. It’s about the folks that never glanced up at their rearview mirrors as their hometowns melted into the horizon. These are the ones that stayed behind or, worse yet, got left behind.

Strictly speaking, these people are still alive. They go about their monotonous, mundane lives as best they can, picking up double shifts at Walmart, schlepping their dull-eyed kids to and from peewee football practice or trying in vain to make ends meet as a single parent amidst the crippling tandem of colossal unemployment and double-digit inflation. Deep down, though, something inside of them has died — their joie de vivre extinguished by the unfulfilled promises of youth and tedium of adult life. Their once deeply held creed — that a tank full of gas is all you need to score freedom — and the light of flashier, more glamorous, greener pastures has been debunked.

Channeling this depressive, vacuous vibe by recording Nebraska on a four-track Portastudio 144, Springsteen chronicles the swelling divide between the haves and have-nots. On “Atlantic City”, he warns us that America, once the land of opportunity, has devolved into a land of “winners and losers/ and don’t get caught on the wrong side of that line.” Pleading for leniency and compassion, the homicidal protagonist of “Johnny 99” reminds us that sometimes economic necessity, not rotten morals, paves the road to savagery and violence. After “they closed down the auto plant in Mahwah” and the bank threatened to take Johnny’s house away, he found himself utterly without hope.

Rather than asserting his innocence at trial, Johnny uses his last words conveying to Judge John Brown the realities of life in the socioeconomic gutter. Just like the blue-collar everyman in “Atlantic City”, Johnny, burdened with “debts no honest man could pay,” can’t reconcile the American dream with his living nightmare. In both songs, the protagonist searches (in vain) for relief outside the law, whether by doing a “little favor” for someone he met last night in “Atlantic City”, or “wavin’ his gun around and threatenin’ to blow his top” on “Johnny 99”.

You mention that Nebraska follows comparatively effusive 1980 offering The River. Does all this mourning over the squandered freedom and rust belt suffocation come out of left field, or does Springsteen tip his hand a bit on Nebraska’s predecessor?

BK: Yes, of course. Even as starkly as Nebraska stands out in the Springsteen cannon, it didn’t happen in a vacuum. It might seem hard to trace any of Nebraska’s quiet, murderous desperation back to the 20-track opus The River, but it’s all there. The loneliness, the despondency, the idea as you put it, Henry, that sometimes you don’t make it out of the “dead man’s town.” Sometimes the gas tank runs dry.

The main character from The River’s title track can’t find work, he can’t give his pregnant 19-year-old wife a proper wedding, and he has no real prospect of ever getting out from “down in the valley.” This is the same person we see again on “Atlantic City”, “Johnny 99”, or even on “State Trooper” or “Highway Patrolman”. There is a difference, though: on The River, they have the titular river to wash away their broken promises. The people we meet on Nebraska have nothing. Or, as the borderline-homicidal character from “State Trooper” puts it, “The only thing that I’ve got/ been bothering me my whole life.”

Pre-Nebraska, Bruce offered glimpses into the depths of his darkest psyche, but there was almost always a ladder to help us climb out. Hell, “Hungry Heart” might just be the darkest song the guy has ever written, but lyrics about a man who gets fed up and leaves his family nearly lose their impact when paired with such bubbly instrumentation. Imagine that track recorded with just an acoustic guitar and Bruce’s shitty Portastudio, and you’ve got something that’d fit perfectly on Nebraska.

You don’t have to be a Springsteen scholar to know that redemption and salvation are two of his most common themes. Redemption comes in the form of a car, a girl, a killer sax solo. He preaches salvation through a song, a river, or a sunny day at the shore. On Nebraska, even death can’t bring deliverance. Probably my favorite line on the whole record comes on the title track, when his fictionalized Starkweather character is sentenced to death. He tell us, “They declared me unfit to live/ said into that great void my soul be hurled.” (If there’s a better metaphor for death, I haven’t heard it.) This person isn’t even going to hell. His soul is doomed to drift about in this “great void” for all eternity. The worst part is, he doesn’t even care because at the end of it all, “I guess there’s just a meanness in this world.”

One of the unsung moments on the album lies in the dry sarcasm Springsteen uses to tease us on closer “Reason To Believe”. Going by title alone, you think he’s about to leave us with a glimmer of hope, but he’s actually mocking us. There’s a man pulled over by the side of the road poking his dead dog with a stick, as if this will somehow revive his deceased canine. Instead of mourning or sympathizing, you can practically see Bruce roll his eyes when he sings, “At the end of every hard-earned day/ people find some reason to believe.”

Okay, so we’ve established that the Springsteen on Nebraska was a totally different animal than anything anyone had seen before, so let’s dive into the tracks themselves a bit more. Henry, do you have a favorite?

HH: I’ve always been a bit obsessed with the beautiful melancholy of “Reason To Believe”.  Rather than hearing snide sarcasm in Bruce’s downtrodden lyrics and gravelly vocals, I hear resilience, guts, and gumption.

It’s true that the folks in “Reason To Believe” have it rough. There’s the man mourning over a mutilated dog carcass, the tragically abandoned sweetheart waiting “down at the end of that dirt road for young Johnny to come back,” and that pathetic bridegroom shuffling his feet all alone at the altar as “the sun sets behind a weepin’ willow tree.” Their lives are chock-full of pain, hardship, and disappointment. But despite absorbing some brutal blows, they aren’t broken. They haven’t given up, and they sure as hell aren’t about to lie down and die. They’re survivors, they’ve found something to hold on to, something to get them through their 9-5 grinds with a few scraps of dignity and hope intact. Whether it’s God, six-packs of Bud, or a triumphantly cathartic Bruce Springsteen concert, these people have found something on which to graft their battered self-esteems and gutted personalities.

The precise form in which this “something” presents itself doesn’t really matter; what’s significant is that these rust belt everymen have found “some reason to believe” that maybe things aren’t so bad, that their fortunes actually could be on the upswing, or that by the time they’re six feet under, their communities will recall them with respect and admiration. Here even death has a silver lining, as Springsteen deftly alludes to the cyclicality of life by juxtaposing the passing of an old man “in a whitewash shotgun shack” with the baptism of baby Kyle Williams.

Set to a wispy harmonica and sparse acoustic guitar, Springsteen presents a phantasmagoria of disappointment and decay. Leading into each chorus with a fleeting glimpse of some wretched schmuck shunned by a disloyal lover or perturbed by the stark finality of death, we find the song’s protagonists on the precipice of surrender and despair. But just when all appears lost, faint rays of sunshine pierce through the clouds, drawing them back from the edge.  Moaning and groaning, Springsteen sings of this puzzling phenomenon. “At the end of every hard-earned day/ people find some reason to believe.”

Strongly emphasizing the phrase “hard-earned day” with his rasping vocal to highlight the interminable burden these people bear, Springsteen whispers the song’s titular lyric as the chorus segues seamlessly into a fresh portrait of heartache and sorrow. Sure, this “reason to believe” may be nothing more than an echo or a shadow, but at least it’s something. And in a world sharply divided between haves and have-nots, something is a whole a lot better than nothing.

So, Bryant, am I right to presume that you’re partial to the album’s title track?

BK: “Nebraska” is a monster, no doubt. But the one that has always resonated most with me is “State Trooper”. It’s just a bare-bones guitar line and Springsteen’s hollow vocals that sound both distant and like he’s whispering right into your ear. It’s a not-so-subtle nod to Suicide, who Springsteen was a big fan of during this period. He even famously said, “If Elvis came back from the dead, I think he would sound like [Suicide frontman] Alan Vega.”

Suicide’s 10-minute electronic murder ballad “Frankie Teardrop” deeply affected Springsteen, and it didn’t take him long to release a track brimming with just as much desperation and pent-up rage. The man he introduces us to is a loose cannon in every sense of the term. Driving on the Jersey turnpike in the dead of night, he tells us, “License, registration, I ain’t got none/ but I got a clear conscience about the things that I’ve done.” It’s an utterly terrifying experience for the listener, as their imagination starts running wild. How many people has he already killed? Where is he going? How long before he kills again? Even after hundreds of listens, it never fails to make my palms sweat and plant a knot deep in my stomach. It’s an amazing feat of craftsmanship that he’s able to elicit that kind of response with the limited toolbox he was working with.

The line “Hi ho Silver-o, deliver me from nowhere” encapsulates the entire album perfectly. Here is someone who is so dead inside that even God has given up on him. There’s no hope left, so he’s going to sit back and watch the world burn. That, to me, is what Nebraska is all about. It’s also why the album isn’t widely appreciated outside of Springsteen diehards. His storytelling had never been stronger, but these weren’t necessarily tales people were comfortable hearing, let alone playing at family BBQs or karaoke bars.

HH: While I agree that Nebraska paints a dark and dire picture, I just can’t believe that Bruce and his buddies have lost all hope. Take “Open All Night”, the only Nebraska song to feature an electric guitar. Though lacking the alluring and naughty thrill of escape heard in fellow nocturnal automotive ditties “Spirit in the Night” and “Thunder Road” (“Show a little faith/ there’s magic in the night”), the track poignantly champions the restorative tandem of rock music and the open highway.

Though the New Jersey turnpike’s “lunar landscape” may be “spooky at night when you’re all alone,” our protagonist swallows his fear, fuels up, and braves the long, winding road separating him from his Wanda. As the singer fights off physical exhaustion and emotional demons, the song ends with the promise of a new day (“sun’s just a red ball risin’ over them refinery towers”) and an appeal to that great haloed DJ in the sky (“hear my last prayer/ hey ho rock n’ roll deliver me from nowhere”). As long as he’s got a car and an FM radio, anything (even deliverance and redemption) is within reach.

Springsteen’s music bristles with the tension between the collective and the individual. There is a burning passion to escape, to strike out on one’s own, but a concurrent awareness of the need to connect and ultimately return to a larger community. Albums like Greetings from Asbury Park and Born To Run reveal the need to establish a unique personality through rebellion and escape and then reconcile that identity with community so as to alleviate the pain of alienation. Nebraska shows us that failure to balance these needs begets the intense heartbreak of sorrow and regret. Thankfully, it’s never fully hopeless. There’s always something to latch onto like a lifeboat amidst icy waters: a spouse, a rusty old Ford, or, as Springsteen boisterously and garishly channels on 1984’s Born in the USA, bright and blinding patriotism.

Still think there’s no hope, Bryant?

BK: Henry, you almost have me convinced. Almost. Listening to “Open All Night” as I write this now, I can hear the same guy who once begged Rosie to come out tonight. He’s buried deep, and probably has a body or two stuffed in his trunk, but he’s just as earnest about getting back to his baby. I still think it’s impossible to tease any inkling of hope out of songs like “Nebraska” or “State Trooper”, but there are times on the album I suppose a silver lining does peek its head through the darkness and pain.

Perhaps that’s what makes Nebraska Springsteen’s most rewarding album. Tom Morello is quoted as saying, “I didn’t know there was music like that, that was as impactful and as heavy as Nebraska was. The alienation that I felt was for the first time expressed in music.” The key word there is impactful. Springsteen’s more commercial work is certainly impactful, but in the way of your first kiss or a mother’s hug. Nebraska is more akin to your first fistfight. Each experience packs one hell of a wallop, emotionally and developmentally, but there are few things that teach you more about yourself than getting an ass whooping. The road may be paved with broken hearts and buried bodies, but the payoff is magnificent.

Bruce Springsteen Nebraska (1982)

From pitchfork.com March 2018

Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we explore the solitary sound of the incomparable Nebraska.

Bruce Springsteen’s 1982 solo album Nebraska has been called a folk album, and that’s true to an extent in both its acoustic setting and, on some of the material, in the construction of the songs. But folk songs in the traditional sense are in part defined by how they travel through culture, typically by being played in person for other people. Nebraska invites no such feeling of communion. These songs aren’t part of a shared language that people in a room might speak to each other, they are one-way transmissions from a distant, lonely place. But the signals that come through on Nebraska crackle with electricity—sometimes it’s just a hum, and sometimes it seems like a circuit is going to explode.

In early 1982, Bruce Springsteen was living in a rented house in Colts Neck, New Jersey, recuperating from a year-long tour following his 1980 double album The River. His band played 140 marathon shows and were on their way to becoming one of the biggest rock acts in the world. During this period, Springsteen tasked his guitar tech, Mike Batlan, with buying a simple tape recorder so that he could tinker with some new songs and arrangements without having to bother with renting studio time. Batlan picked up a Teac Tascam 144 Portastudio, a then-new device that was the first piece of equipment to use a standard cassette tape for multi-track recording. The new machine arrived in Springsteen’s life at the perfect moment, during what was arguably the most fruitful songwriting period in Springsteen’s long career, one that would produce enough material for two albums (1982’s Nebraska and 1984’s Born in the U.S.A.) with dozens of additional songs to spare. On it, he would craft what is still the most singular album in his catalog.

Nebraska remains an outlier for Springsteen, a record that sits uneasily in his discography. Instead of making an impact upon release, Nebraska has been accruing weight gradually over the last four decades, becoming a marker of its socioeconomic era as well as an early document of the later home-recording revolution. It stands alone partly because Springsteen didn’t tour behind it—his work is ultimately about his connection to his audience, and that connection is felt most intensely when he’s performing onstage—and partly because the record itself is kind of an accident, something that fell into place before Springsteen knew what to do with it. “I had no conscious political agenda or social theme,” he later wrote of this time in his autobiography, Born to Run. “I was after a feeling, a tone that felt like the world I’d known and still carried inside me.”

Springsteen’s initial burst of material in Colts Neck clustered around isolation and disillusionment. There were connections to his earlier work in these new songs—two tracks on The River, “Stolen Car” and “Wreck on the Highway,” conveyed a similar feeling of despair—but the new work was different. Springsteen seemed both emotionally closer to his characters but also less interested in judging them. These songs had no heroes and no villains, everyone in them was making their way with what they were given, every grim or brutal scene had its own context and its own internal logic.

Early in his career, Springsteen’s work thrived on personal instinct, but in isolation, it became more reliant on specific inputs. He’d transform ideas he discovered in books and films and the news into frameworks for songs: the short stories of Flannery O’Connor, which detailed the harsh lives of people living on the margins; Ron Kovick’s Born on the Fourth of July, in which a gung-ho soldier becomes deeply scarred by the actions of his government. At some point, he saw Terrence Malick’s Badlands on television, a film based on the 1957–58 killing spree of Charlie Starkweather. The Starkweather murders were meaningless, and the randomness of that violence and inability to explain it fit with the mood of Springsteen’s songwriting.

Once the new songs recorded on the Portastudio began to gel, Springsteen selected some of his favorites, ran his simple arrangements through a Gibson Echoplex unit to add some reverb and echo, and mixed them down to a boombox he had laying around the house. He sent the tape to his manager, Jon Landau, with handwritten notes on the songs and ideas for how they might find their way on to a new record. Springsteen’s letter to Landau, reproduced in his book of lyrics, Songs, suggests that the album that was emerging was mysterious even to its creator. “I got a lot of ideas but I’m not exactly sure of where I’m going,” he wrote. He didn’t quite understand what he had, but he did feel he was entering new territory with his work.

Springsteen carried around the cassette in his pocket as he tried to figure out what to do with his new collection of songs. The initial assumption was that his E Street compatriots would flesh them out. There were recording dates with the full band who tried to give the pieces life like they had so many other songs Springsteen had written on his own. And when that didn’t work, there were sessions of Springsteen alone, trying to capture the stark feel of the original tape in a professional studio with proper fidelity. Springsteen never could recapture the atmosphere that imbued the demos; eventually, the choice was made to put it out as-is.

The power of Nebraska’s whole comes from Springsteen’s blend of fiction and memoir—some songs are personal and intimate with details drawn from Springsteen’s own life, others are the stuff of novels and cinema. “Nebraska” was Springsteen’s re-telling of the Starkweather saga, and it begins, as the film does, with a shot of a young girl twirling her baton outside her house. From the innocence of this image—boy meets girl in the heartland—the song moves quickly and seamlessly to the narrator’s description of the killing spree. The fact that we’re living in a world where these things can coexist in such proximity is terrifying, and it suggests that the symbols and structures that we think exist to protect us may, in the end, offer us nothing.

The album’s violence continues. “Johnny 99” describes an act of murder that is the product of blinding desperation; in “Highway Patrolman,” a cop protects his violent brother even though doing so goes against everything he believes. “Atlantic City,” the only song released as a single, is a masterpiece of withheld information, a story of an out-of-luck character who is about to perform an unnamed act that he hopes will rescue his life from oblivion. Springsteen never personally experienced these scenes, but he renders them with such care and detail, he puts the listener squarely in the center of them.

In contrast, “Used Cars,” “My Father’s House,” and “Mansion on the Hill” draw from Springsteen’s past, particularly his complicated relationship with his father. “Used Cars” and “Mansion on the Hill” are written as memories and “My Father’s House” is told as a dream. But all are permeated by a deep yearning for connection, a wish that the unexpressed could be finally be spoken, and that barriers erected over a lifetime could dissolve. In the world of this record, these are the small and quiet tragedies that can nudge you down a path leading to larger and more explosive ones.

On paper, this is Springsteen at his most novelistic, trying to get into the heads of murderers and corrupt cops, or diaristic, revisiting detailed scenes from his childhood. One writer even turned the songs’ narratives into a book of short stories. But the record’s most lasting power comes not from its words or melodies but from its sound. The atmosphere in the room and the grain of Springsteen’s processed voice scramble notions of a fixed time and place. To put on Nebraska and hear its world of echo is to enter a dream. As Bruce Springsteen songs go, these are very good ones, but their true meaning came out in the presentation.

Nebraska is above all a sonic experience, which explains why he could never get the songs right in a proper studio. “A lot of its content was in its style, in the treatment of it,” he said in an interview in 1984. “It needed that really kinda austere, echoey sound, just one guitar—one guy telling his story.”

The atmospheric processing on Nebraska, the vast majority of which was imparted by the Echoplex during the mixdown stage, is crucial to the album’s meaning. The slapback echo present on some of the songs conjure early rockabilly (the technique, which thickens sound by folding a slight delay onto the signal, was pioneered by Sam Phillips at Sun Studio and can be heard in all its glory on the sides Elvis Presley recorded there), and the heavy dose of reverb has been present in all kinds of music, from Bobby Vinton’s “Blue Velvet” to any number of country hits. But rather than invoking a certain era, genre, or style, the sound of Nebraska brings to mind the radio, the medium through which these techniques were first widely distributed.

The right amount of reverb and echo can make a cheap speaker in a car’s dashboard sound lush and dreamy. Nebraska’s homespun production reinforces the notion that recorded music happens across vast amounts of time and space. The guy playing and singing alone in this rented room in 1982 is connected to the person hearing it by invisible forces moving through the air. That separation, underscored by the arrangements, give the album its force.

A few songs on the record contain references to transmissions, and these people often find themselves connected to each other in the most distant ways, often by wireless. Roads are littered with radio relay towers, radios in dark cars are choked with talk shows, a cop is called to action by the crackle of the radio. “State Trooper,” a song directly influenced by “Frankie Teardrop” by the synth-punk band Suicide, is Nebraska’s atmosphere reduced to its essence, just an ominous repeating guitar and a voice that sounds like a howling ghost. A Springsteen song like “Darkness on the Edge of Town” shares thematic elements with the songs on Nebraska, but the quiet/loud motif is designed for the stage, where Springsteen and his listeners could share in the energy. “State Trooper” might as well be beamed in from an orbiting satellite—there’s the song and then there is silence.

“State Trooper” also illustrates how the automobile, central to Springsteen’s work throughout his career, functions a bit differently on Nebraska. On Born to Run, the car represented escape, while on Darkness on the Edge of Town and parts of The River it was used to define boundaries, to mark the places where the dramas of life unfold. On Nebraska, the automobile is a kind of isolation chamber, a steel husk that keeps its passengers apart from the world. “Used Cars,” a comparatively gentle song inspired by Springsteen’s own life, finds a child experiencing the shame of class difference. The family is each inhabiting their own world, the father and son unable to connect and share with each other what they might be feeling in the moment. The boy knows only by what he sees, not what his father tells him; the father, consumed with his own shame, has no sense of the boy’s experiences.

Springsteen wrote that he wanted Nebraska to consist of “black bedtime stories,” and the album almost seems to take place during one long night. Those who have jobs are working the night shift. Coming as it does at the end of the album, “Reason to Believe” feels a bit like a sunrise. Suddenly there’s a crack of light, a bit of humor; we can take a breath. The levity comes not from the details of the song, which include two shattered relationships and the death of a dog and a relative, but from the perspective of the person telling the story. Perhaps life, rather than being grim and hopeless, is merely absurd.

In the arc of Springsteen’s career, Nebraska is still a blip. It’s an essential record in the history of home recording, but it was sort of a cul-de-sac for Springsteen himself. He has returned twice to the general format of the record, releasing the mostly solo and mostly acoustic albums The Ghost of Tom Joad (1995) and Devils & Dust (2005), but neither comes close to the alchemy of Nebraska. This one just happened. Springsteen covers the entire episode of the record in just a few pages in Born to Run, and there isn’t a lot to say. He wrote the songs, he put them down on a demo, and that demo became the record. It didn’t sell particularly well and got no airplay. “Life went on,” is how he ends the section of his book on the record. And so it does.

Bruce Springsteen Nebraska (1982)

From Rolling Stone

After ten years of forging his own brand of fiery, expansive rock & roll, Bruce Springsteen has decided that some stories are best told by one man, one guitar. Flying in the face of a sagging record industry with an intensely personal project that could easily alienate radio, rock’s gutsiest mainstream performer has dramatically reclaimed his right to make the records he wants to make, and damn the consequences. This is the bravest of Springsteen’s six records; it’s also his most startling, direct and chilling. And if it’s a risky move commercially, Nebraska is also a tactical masterstroke, an inspired way out of the high-stakes rock & roll game that requires each new record to be bigger and grander than the last.

Until now, it looked as if 1973’s dizzying The Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle would be the last Springsteen album to surprise people. Ensuing records simply refined, expanded and deepened his artistry. But Nebraska comes as a shock, a violent, acid-etched portrait of a wounded America that fuels its machinery by consuming its people’s dreams. It is a portrait painted with old tools: a few acoustic guitars, a four-track cassette deck, a vocabulary derived from the plain-spoken folk music of Woody Guthrie and the dark hillbilly laments of Hank Williams. The style is steadfastly, defiantly out-of-date, the singing flat and honest, the music stark, deliberate and unadorned.

Nebraska is an acoustic triumph, a basic folk album on which Springsteen has stripped his art down to the core. It’s as harrowing as Darkness on the Edge of Town, but more measured. Every small touch speaks volumes: the delicacy of the acoustic guitars, the blurred sting of the electric guitars, the spare, grim images. He’s now telling simple stories in the language of a deferential common man, peppering his sentences with “sir’s.” “My name is Joe Roberts,” he sings. “I work for the state.”

As The River closed, Springsteen found himself haunted by a highway death. On Nebraska, violent death is his starting point. The title track is an audacious, scary beginning. Singing in a voice borrowed from Guthrie and early Bob Dylan, he takes the part of mass murderer Charlie Starkweather to quietly sing, “I can’t say that I’m sorry for the things that we done/At least for a little while, sir, me and her we had us some fun.” The music is gentle and soothing, but this is no romanticized outlaw tale à la Guthrie’s “Pretty Boy Floyd.” The casual coldbloodedness, the singer’s willingness to undertake the role and the music’s pastoral calm make Starkweather all the more horrific.

Springsteen follows with another tale of real-life murder, this one involving mob wars in Atlantic City. With “Nebraska” and “Atlantic City,” his landscape has taken on new, broader boundaries, and when he begins “Mansion on the Hill” with a reference to “the edge of town,” it’s clear that his usual New Jersey turf has opened its borders to include Nebraska and Wyoming and forty-seven other states. Crowds on the final leg of his last tour saw hints that Springsteen was heading toward this territory when he talked of Allan Nevins and Henry Steele Commager’s history of the United States and Joe Klein’s Woody Guthrie: a Life, and when he sang the songs of Guthrie, John Fogerty and Elvis Presley, all uniquely American stories.

The keynote lines on Nebraska — “Deliver me from nowhere” and “I got debts that no honest man can pay” — each surface in two songs. The former ends both “State Trooper” and “Open All Night,” while the latter turns up in “Atlantic City” and “Johnny 99.” The album’s honest men — and they outnumber its criminals, though side one’s string of bloodletters suggests otherwise — are all paying debts and looking for deliverance that never comes. The compassion with which Springsteen sings every line can’t hide the fact that there’s no peace to be found in the darkness, no cleansing river running through town.

As on The River, the most outwardly optimistic songs on the new album are sung by a man who knows full well that his dreams of easy deliverance are empty. In “Used Cars,” the singer watches his father buy another clunker and makes a vow as heartfelt as it is heartbreakingly hollow: “Mister, the day the lottery I win/I ain’t ever gonna ride in no used car again.” And the LP’s one seeming refuge turns out to be illusion: in “My Father’s House,” a devastating capper to Springsteen’s cycle of “father” songs, the house is a sanctuary only in the singer’s dreams. When he awakens, he finds that his father is gone, that the house sits at the end of a highway “where our sins lie unatoned.” By this point, the convicted murderer of “Johnny 99” is one of the few characters who’s seemingly figured out how to retain his dignity. He asks to be executed.

If this record is as deep and unsettling as anything Springsteen has recorded, it is also his narrowest and most single-minded work. He is not extending or advancing his own style so much as he is temporarily adopting a style codified by others. But in that decision are multiple strengths: Springsteen’s clear, sharp focus, his insistence on painting small details so clearly and his determination to make a folk album firmly in the tradition. “My Father’s House” may be the only cut on side two that can stand up to the string of songs that open the record, but inconsistency is perhaps inevitable after that astonishing initial stretch: the title track; “Altantic City”; and “Highway Patrolman,” an indelible tale of the ties that bind and the toll familial love exacts, with one of Springsteen’s most delicious, delirious reveries — “Me and Frankie laughin’ and drinkin’/Nothing feels better than blood on blood/Takin’ turns dancin’ with Maria/As the band played ‘Night of the Johnstown Flood.'”

By the end of the record, paradoxically, the choking dust that hangs over Springsteen’s landscape makes its occasional rays of sunlight shine brighter. In “Atlantic City,” for example, a rueful chorus makes the song sound nearly as triumphant as “Promised Land”: “Everything dies, baby that’s a fact/But maybe everything that dies some day comes back/Put your makeup on, fix your hair up pretty/And meet me tonight in Atlantic City.”

Finally, it comes down to that: an old dress and a meeting across from the casino is sometimes all it takes. “Reason to Believe” adds the final brush strokes, by turns blackly humorous and haunting. One man stands alongside a highway, poking a dead dog as if to revive it; another heads down to the river to wed. The bride never shows, the groom stands waiting, the river flows on, and people, Bruce sings with faintly befuddled respect, still find their reasons to believe. Naive, simple and telling, it is the caption beneath Bruce Springsteen’s abrasive, clouded and ultimately glorious portrait of America.

Bruce Springsteen: Nebraska (1982)

From allmusic.com

There is an adage in the record business that a recording artist’s demos of new songs often come off better than the more polished versions later worked up in a studio. But Bruce Springsteen was the first person to act on that theory, when he opted to release the demo versions of his latest songs, recorded with only acoustic or electric guitar, harmonica, and vocals, as his sixth album, Nebraska.

It was really the content that dictated the approach, however. Nebraska’s ten songs marked a departure for Springsteen, even as they took him farther down a road he had been traveling previously. Gradually, his songs had become darker and more pessimistic, and those on Nebraska marked a new low. They also found him branching out into better developed stories. The title track was a first-person account of the killing spree of mass murderer Charlie Starkweather. (It can’t have been coincidental that the same story was told in director Terrence Malick’s 1973 film Badlands, also used as a Springsteen song title.)

That song set the tone for a series of portraits of small-time criminals, desperate people, and those who loved them. Just as the recordings were unpolished, the songs themselves didn’t seem quite finished; sometimes the same line turned up in two songs. But that only served to unify the album. Within the difficult times, however, there was hope, especially as the album went on. “Open All Night” was a Chuck Berry-style rocker, and the album closed with “Reason to Believe,” a song whose hard-luck verses were belied by the chorus — even if the singer couldn’t understand what it was, “people find some reason to believe.”

Still, Nebraska was one of the most challenging albums ever released by a major star on a major record label.