Bruce Springsteen Talks the Poetry of His Classic Album ‘Nebraska’

“I lived in this house exactly half my life ago,” Bruce Springsteen said. It may not sound like much, but this small bedroom in Colts Neck, New Jersey, which still sports the original shag orange carpet, is where Springsteen recorded what he considers his masterpiece: his 1982 album “Nebraska,” 10 dark and gloomy songs. “This is where it happened,” he said.

I saw her standing on her lawn in front of her house, twirling her stick.
She and I went for a walk, sir, and ten innocent people died.
From the city of Lincoln, Nebraska, with a sawed-off .410 on my lap
All the way to the wastelands of Wyoming, I killed everything in my path.

“If I had to pick one album and say, ‘This will represent you in 50 years,’ I would pick ‘Nebraska,'” he said.

It was written 42 years ago, at a time of great turmoil in Springsteen’s inner life: “I hit some kind of personal wall that I didn’t even know existed,” he said. “It was my first real major depression, where I realized, ‘Oh, I’ve got to do something about this.'”

After a successful tour for the album “The River,” he recorded his first Top 10 hit, “Hungry Heart.” He was 32, a bona fide rock star surrounded by success and learning its limits.

Axelrod said: “Your rock ‘n’ roll medication, singing in front of 40,000 people, it’s all just anesthesia.”

“Yeah, and it worked for me,” Springsteen said. “I think in your 20s, a lot of things work for you. In your 30s, that’s when you start to become an adult. Suddenly, I looked around and I thought, ‘Where are things? Where’s my home? Where’s my partner? Where are the sons or daughters that I thought I was going to have?’ And I realized none of those things were there.”

“So I thought, ‘OK, the first thing I have to do when I get home is remember who I am and where I come from.'”

In the renovated farmhouse he rented, he tried to understand why his success left him so alienated. “It’s all inside me,” he said. “You can either take it and turn it into something positive, or it can destroy you.”

Author Warren Zanes said, “There are records, movies, books that don’t just come in the front door. They come in the back door, they come in through a trap door, and they stay with you all your life.”

Zanes’ recent book, “Deliver Me from Nowhere,” offers a profound and moving examination of the making of “Nebraska.”

Springsteen’s pain is rooted in a lonely childhood. “Here’s Bruce Springsteen making a record from sort of the depths of his own life,” Zanes said. “They were very poor. And then he becomes Bruce SpringsteenHe felt that his past was complicating his present. And he wanted to free himself from it.

For Springsteen, liberation always came through writing. As he filled notebook after notebook (“It’s funny, because I don’t remember doing all this work!” he mused as he thumbed through his writings), the album didn’t take shape until late one night, when he was flipping through channels and came across “Badlands,” Terrence Malick’s film about Charles Starkweather, whose 1957-58 murder spree took place mostly in Nebraska. “I called the reporter who had done the story in Nebraska,” he says. “And amazingly, she was still at the paper. She was a lovely woman, and we talked for about a half hour. And that allowed me to focus on what I wanted to write.”

Springsteen found a muse in a serial killer:

I can’t say I’m sorry for the things we did.
At least for a little while, sir, she and I had a lot of fun…
They wanted to know why I did what I did
Well, sir, I guess there’s just one wickedness in this world.

“There is evil in this world. That explains everything Starkweather has done,” Axelrod said.

“Yes, I tried to locate where their humanity was, as best I could,” Springsteen said.

In a burst of creativity, he wrote 15 songs in a matter of weeks, and one night in January 1982, it was time to record, on a 4-track cassette recorder. One of rock’s biggest stars sat in that room, alone, and sang, getting exactly the sound he was looking for.

And the acoustics? “Not bad,” Springsteen said. “The orange carpet makes it really quiet. There’s not a lot of echo. It was not only beautiful, but also very practical!”

Some songs explore the confusion left by childhood, such as “My Father’s House”:

I walked up the steps and stood on the porch
a woman I didn’t recognize came and spoke to me
Through a chained door
I told him my story and who I had come for.
She said, “I’m sorry, son, but no one has that name.
“He doesn’t live here anymore”

Springsteen said: “‘Mansion on the Hill,’ ‘My Father’s House,’ ‘Used Cars,’ they’re all written from the point of view of children, children trying to make sense of the world they were born into.”

Others have portrayed adults who have been left behind or cast aside. The music, Springsteen says, has a “very stark, dark, lonely sound. Very stark, very bare.”

Springsteen mixed the songs on a cassette tape he carried in his back pocket for a few weeks using an old tape recorder. “I hope you at least had a plastic case on it,” Axelrod said.

“I don’t think I had a file,” he replied. “I was lucky I didn’t lose it!”

Springsteen’s band recorded what they had on the tape, but he wasn’t looking to make it bigger and bolder: “It was serendipitous,” he said. “I planned to write good songs, teach them to the band, go into the studio and record them. But every time I tried to improve on the tape I made in this little room? It’s always the same story: If it gets better, it’s going to get worse.”

Bruce Springsteen wasn’t working on E Street, but on an entirely different road. According to Zanes, “Nebraska was muddy. It was imperfect. It wasn’t finished. All the things you shouldn’t put out, he turn off.”

Everything dies, baby, that’s a fact
But maybe everything that dies comes back one day.
Put on makeup, do your hair nicely
And meet me tonight in Atlantic City

Axelrod asked, “Was there a part of you that was like, ‘Oh my God, what am I putting here?'”

“I knew what the Nebraska record meant,” Springsteen said. “It was also a signal that I was sending: ‘I’ve had success, but I do what I want to do. I make the records I want to make. I’m trying to tell a bigger story, and that’s the work I’m trying to do for you.’”

A few more songs that didn’t make the cut? You probably heard them later, including “Born in the USA,” “Pink Cadillac” and “Downbound Train,” songs that the guy in the leather jacket who wrote about fuel-injected suicide machines with chrome wheels kept in a binder with Snoopy on the cover.

In that small room, Springsteen the rocker made an album that embodied Springsteen the poet. Imagine if he hadn’t. Axelrod reflected: “And then people could have looked at a career and said, ‘Oh, that was great, man, 70,000 people singing ‘Rosalita’ in the stadium.’ But that might have been closer to the end of the career, given what you did.”

“Yeah, I just wanted to do more, more than that,” Springsteen said. “I love doing it. I still love it today. But I wanted more than that.”

“If they want to appreciate your work, try anything; if they want to understand “Your work, try ‘Nebraska’?” Axelrod asked.

“Yes, I agree with that,” he replied. “I totally agree with that.”

An earlier version of this story originally aired on April 30, 2023.

READ AN EXTRACT: “Deliver Me from Nowhere: The Making of Bruce Springsteen’s “Nebraska””

You can listen to Bruce Springsteen’s “Nebraska” by clicking the embed below (free Spotify subscription required to listen to full tracks):

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Written by: Jason Sacca. Edited by: Ed Givnish.

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