Deliver Me from Nowhere: The Making of Bruce Springsteen's Nebraska

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Even when he stoops to preening celebrity side hustles, like chatting with Barack Obama in their 2021 book Renegades: Born in the USA, Springsteen trades on oceans of good faith. The fascinating story behind the making of Bruce Springsteen’s most surprising album, Nebraska, revealing its pivotal role in Springsteen’s career.

He also emphasises the importance of its accidental genesis, the fact that Springsteen pressed ‘record’ on his new TEAC 144 4-track with no intention that these demos would be his next album, rather than sketches for what became Born In The USA. Few other rock stars had anywhere near the same kind of integrity, fighting a court case instead of touring. They harmonized as youthful symbols embracing rock old age, beyond what anybody might have imagined as teenagers embracing teen music, beyond even rock’s grandiose early promise. The book ends strongly, with a series of musicians - including Rosanne Cash and Laura Cantrell - talking about Nebraska. In the refrains, Joe’s wife, Maria, dances with the brothers, and a brooding love triangle festers just beneath the song’s surface.The natural follow-up to Springsteen's hugely successful album The River should have been the hit-packed Born in the U. When the capacity to achieve something closer to perfection — or to edit out a blemish or to select a single image from hundreds — is widely available, most people choose to make the fix.

He also interviewed more than a dozen celebrated musicians, from Rosanne Cash to Steven Van Zandt, about their reaction to the album.In one exchange, Zanes gamely compares the conjoined Nebraska/Born In The USA diptych to the heroic trials of Homer’s Odyssey, with Springsteen hilariously deadpan in response: “Go on”… “Incredible”. In the spring of 2021, Bruce Springsteen invited me to spend some time with him in Colts Neck, New Jersey, so that we could talk about Nebraska. Zanes has emerged from the wilderness of ‘Nebraska’ with one of the greatest books about the creative process ever written. Any song could become a thousand different records, but sometimes the recording studio is a place of pure lightness because a song is becoming just the recording it should be. It gave me the feeling I got from, say, Chuck Berry’s “Maybellene” or the punk rock of Richard Hell and the Voidoids’ “Blank Generation.

Nebraska” was dirty, kind of mumbled in sections, its hushed tones punctuated by a few screams; it told scary stories. 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. A couple more drafts might have turned it into a literary marvel on par with Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl (2015) by Sleater-Kinney’s Carrie Brownstein, or I Am Brian Wilson (2016) by the eponymous frontman of the Beach Boys.I was writing a type of song that I probably would have been embarrassed to sit down and sing in front of the band in the studio,” Springsteen admits to Zanes, discussing the sessions he recorded on a four-track TEAC 144 at a rented house in Colts Neck, New Jersey. Finance is provided by PayPal Credit (a trading name of PayPal UK Ltd, Whittaker House, Whittaker Avenue, Richmond-Upon-Thames, Surrey, United Kingdom, TW9 1EH).

While building his devoted audience, Springsteen had cemented their loyalty by twining rock star privilege with mensch largesse.

Warren Zanes spoke to many people involved with making Nebraska, including Bruce Springsteen himself. This book is about Bruce Springsteen’s weird, gothic, heartbroken 1982 left turn, ‘Nebraska,’ which is not just a startling swerve in the career of a great American artist or a pivotal yet neglected transitional moment in the history of recorded music, but the question Springsteen asked himself forty years ago: what do you do when you begin to understand that the things you have loved most have begun to do you harm? It’s an embarrassing karaoke set that mixes great material with Tonka-toy instrumentals for a mismatch of frame to subject. Yet there would have been no Dancing In The Dark without the preceding Nebraska, the one record where Bruce Springsteen admitted no light whatsoever.