Springsteen

There are good albums and great albums, and then there are holy records — worlds you enter as if into a dream and emerge with spirit and neurochemistry changed. Bruce Springsteen‘s 1982 classic Nebraska is one of those. Conceived at the crest of the Reagan years when the singer was in a dark place and rethinking his purpose, it was a pause and a hard reboot, a lo-fi set of home recordings that sounded like nothing in his catalog, and a calm before the storm of Born in the U.S.A. “I was after a feeling,” he wrote of Nebraska in his memoir, “a tone that felt like the world I’d known and still carried inside me.” The result was a hauntingly unsettled piece of art that many people hold very dear. 

But people always crave more, and given that A) Nebraska is mostly an album of spruced-up demos, B) it came from same writing sessions that later produced Born in the U.S.A., and C) superfans and E Streeters alike have been fueling rumors for years about a shelved Electric Nebraska LP, it’s amazing that it’s taken this long for said mythic lost album to surface. Clearly, we have Jeremy Allen White and Deliver Me From Nowhere to thank.

Anyway, here it is. Does it support the myth? Yes and no. Yes, in that there were indeed recordings made in 1982 of some Nebraska songs in fuller arrangements with Bruce’s E Street bandmembers. And no — because strictly speaking there is no Electric Nebraska per se, notwithstanding Springsteen’s equivocations on the point (as reported in this magazine) and the fact that one disc in this five-disc set is titled Electric Nebraska.

Nevertheless: as art history, theological inquiry, and a secular deep dive into the Brucebase rabbit-hole, Nebraska ‘82 is rich material, and for serious Springsteen fans, an essential listen. The first two discs are flecked with revelations. One disc contains outtakes from the original 4-track demos, made by Springsteen in his house in Colts Head, NJ, with extras from a follow-up acoustic studio session at The Power Station that tried, and failed, to better those recordings.

The keystone is the demo of “Born in the U.S.A., which appeared on 1998’s epic loosie compilation Tracks. It opens this set and resonates differently here, showing how much of a piece it was with Nebraska’s vision and where Springsteen’s narrative songwriting was at. It also shows how wrong it would’ve been for Nebraska’s final tracklist — its anthemic chorus, yearning to be free, would’ve felt misplaced. The song’s next iteration, a raw guitar rocker on the Electric Nebraska disc, shows its evolution. Both versions showcase the song’s sharp social critique and conflicted pride more effectively than the final megahit version. But musically, neither is quite as compelling.

Similarly, at least in hindsight, you can hear the party jam in a softly insinuating draft of “Pink Cadillac,” the future Natalie Cole hit and Born in the U.S.A. b-side. It’s sexy and vaguely creepy, a weirdly intimate voice message. Elsewhere, the addition of corner-church piano and bass cloak the exquisite chill of Nebraska’s title track, while a stiff groove and overheated vocals diminish the articulate desperation “Atlantic City” (Levon Helm and The Band would pull off a more convincing band arrangement years later, as would Springsteen & Co.) Two feral punk-rockabilly versions of Born in the U.S.A.’s seething “Downbound Train” speak to Springsteen’s admiration of The Clash. 

But a pair of never-issued songs on the outtakes set are the set’s standouts. “Child Bride” is a disturbing draft of what would transform into Born in the U.S.A.’s “Working on the Highway,” which turned the narrative’s moral thicket, presumably involving an underage girl, into a sort of landlocked sea shanty that, like the album’s title track, drowns out its own narrative. (An early version of “Highway” here obfuscates the narrator’s transgression.) As America attempts to reclaim its pride by whitewashing its unflattering histories, Springsteen’s struggle to balance light and dark on these pointedly American recordings is tremendously poignant. “Gun in Every Home” is another balancing act, a striking outtake that ended up shelved. “I moved to the suburbs yeah, just me and my family/ On the block I live, you got everything that a man would need to want/ Two cars in each garage and a gun in every home,” Springsteen sings flatly. (“When I wrote it, I thought it was a little hysterical,” he admits in the liner notes. “Now of course it seems totally natural.”)

The third and fourth discs — audio and video, respectively — document a (mostly) solo acoustic full-album performance of Nebraska, recorded this past summer sans audience at the Count Basie Theatre, Red Bank, NJ. The film, by Thom Zimny, is about what you’d expect: b&w, moody lighting, the artist striding in slo-mo onto the stage of the empty theater (trigger warning: may spur Covid lockdown flashbacks), then sitting down to play the songs straight through. There’s no attempt to hide the staging, although the accompanying musicians are mostly unseen. You can catch a fleeting glimpse of Larry Campbell in the wings offstage during “Atlantic City,” playing mandolin in the shadows; on “Used Cars,” Charlie Giordano adds glockenspiel fireflies in silhouette.

In the liner notes, Springsteen says he came to this latter-day performance fairly cold, and was struck anew by the songs, by how “their weight impressed upon me.” It’s a powerful performance, though 40-plus years on, as a dude in his 70s, he delivers them as a storyteller outside the story — a bit like Springsteen performing Springsteen on Broadway. On the original Nebraska LP, remastered for the set’s final disc, the performances felt more like method acting by a man possessed, physically inhabited by the stories he told.

Springsteen has said Nebraska is his greatest work, and it’s interesting that, in surveying the original LP and the other vault recordings included here, he seems amazed at what his young self was channeling back then. He uses the word “shocked” more than once in the liner notes. He says “I don’t know where I was coming from for those arrangements,” and “I don’t know what was influencing me at the time.” He concludes: “Most of this stuff is pretty mysterious to me.”

Indeed, mystery is at the core of Nebraska’s magic — the mystery of what drives human beings toward darkness and self-destruction, the mystery of a rich country disrespecting its people, the mystery of an artist reinventing himself with a coal-hot songwriting hand, whispering in his own ear to make the mystery manifest. It did, and when you hear the final Nebraska, the set’s early takes and re-recordings, even the good ones here, are blown away like leaves in a punishing autumn wind. The falsetto howls at the end of “Atlantic City” become ghostly again, not vocal effects deployed variously across the sessions. Many of Nebraska’s songs would become American classics, and it says a lot that Levon Helm’s “Atlantic City” is one of his greatest performances, ditto Emmylou Harris’ version of “My Father’s House.” It says a lot, too, that their versions hewed close to those on the finished Nebraska album. Because Bruce got them dead right.