Happy 40th Anniversary to Bruce Springsteen’s sixth studio album Nebraska, originally released September 30, 1982.
Bruce Springsteen’s most iconic years—the arc from Born to Run (1975) to Nebraska (1982)—are like a slow descent into the underworld. The premise of Born to Run is an easy and obvious one: this town is a lonely and sad one that must be escaped. On Darkness on the Edge of Town (1978), he realizes that the town is not always escapable, either because there’s nowhere else to go or there’s too much holding you down there, for better or worse. On The River (1980), the E Street band soundtracks that heartbreak, showing what’s underneath every bar-band hustler that Springsteen spent his teenage years around.
“Nebraska” moves the narrative several steps forward. The opening and title track tells the story of a mass murderer with no sense of remorse. From the electric chair, he rationalizes his actions like so: “I guess there’s just a meanness in this world.” When the physical or self-medicating escapes of leaving town (like on Born to Run) or playing rock & roll (like on The River) don’t work, there’s presumably only one answer: give in to the darkness and let the worst parts of you out.
Therein lay the premise of the most understated record of the first twenty years of Springsteen’s output. He tried to set this batch of songs with the hard-rocking, pants-dropping, booty-quaking, history-making, legendary E Street Band, but those sessions didn’t prove satisfactory. The full band has too much fight; recording these songs with them would recall the righteous anger of “Badlands” or “Drive All Night.” In order to authentically deliver the hopelessness that the songs of Nebraska evince, this one had to be done alone.
The resulting album consists of the four-track demoes that Springsteen had recorded by himself. The audience relationship here has everything to do with the sense of despair; this is the first Springsteen album where the performances are not trying to mythologize. They are a letter to his friend and bandmates, not public performances.
This is not some cheap argument that a public performance can’t be genuine. But it’s at least worth noticing what we hear on Nebraska is not what Springsteen thinks we needed to hear. Trying to put a public face on these songs resulted in a shelved record. It’s possible that he just didn’t know the answer—he didn’t know what people should hear in these songs—and that’s why Electric Nebraska ended up not working out.
Maybe he just didn’t know how to say this to us: that the guy who had been puzzling over the question of how to escape the meanness in this world had just settled for “you don’t.”
Listen to the Album:
Live performances of Nebraska staples, somewhat predictably, take one of two approaches: the deeply intimate ones (see the heart-stopping reading of “My Father’s House” from 2018’s Springsteen on Broadway) or the raucous ones (see the version of “Johnny 99” from the 2009 DVD Live in Hyde Park). The former versions try to recuperate the magic of the original record (and sometimes succeed), but they all still carry an air of intentional gravity. In playing the song, the audience has to hold its breath (because they know what’s coming) and Springsteen has to get all serious and deliberate. Space has to be made for the song. On Nebraska, the song is the space itself.
Full-band versions (usually “Atlantic City” and “Johnny 99”) are generally similar in melody and rhythm to their original counterparts, but with twenty people playing at once. In these instances, these songs are part of a longer story that Springsteen tells over the course of the evening, where the characters from Nebraska fit alongside those from the other records, and so he can afford to show the comparisons: look, the guy from “Johnny 99” and the guy from “Darkness on the Edge of Town” are actually pretty similar to each other, and to all of us. And that’s the dark complication at the heart of this: if those two people are similar, then what’s stopping them both from capitulating to hopelessness?
Nebraska is the only Springsteen album without reasons or answers. In every other case, there is a justice or a dignity to fight for, but not on Nebraska. Because what reason or answers are there in all of the violence and abandonment that comprises its runtime? What do we say to the cop in “Highway Patrolman” who chooses to extend grace to his brother, a Vietnam vet who can’t seem to get his life together and is consistently violent?
When the narrator in that song lets his brother drive over the border to Canada, the song is only sad—it doesn’t even occur to you to impose moral judgment on him because you’re so caught up in the narrative. It’s just unfair—and Springsteen argues, tacitly but forcefully, that everything is. As everyone’s parents told them, life isn’t fair. But that doesn’t mean it’s right, and that’s his point.
There are two exceptions to the narrative and aesthetic despair that defines the record: “Atlantic City,” because it’s almost fun, and “Reason to Believe,” because the title seems absurd, given everything we know about the album.
Narratively, “Atlantic City” is a counterpoint to “Meeting Across the River,” which happens to be Billy Joel’s favorite Bruce Springsteen song. In both songs, the narrator tells their girlfriend that they’re going into the city looking to make a big score. In “Meeting Across the River,” the narrative is almost purely optimistic. This guy really thinks that he’s going to make some cash off of this job and all of their problems will be over.
In “Atlantic City,” he is under no such impression. The fast tempo of the song just adds to the sense of inevitability that drives the narrative. “Everything dies, baby, that’s a fact.” He sees nothing good can come out of this, but he’s going to do it anyway because that’s where he’s been driven.
If the trek from Born to Run to Nebraska is a slow descent into the underworld, “Reason To Believe” looks back at that starting point and sees it for what it is. The track profiles four people: a man whose dog died, a woman waiting for her lover to return, a religious family, and and a marrying couple. Putting this group of stories together implies that everyone is holding onto some irrational hope that someday things will be better, whether you’re pinning your hopes on a miracle, religion, or a change of heart. In the chorus, Springsteen can’t believe what he's seeing—in spite of everything he’s seen on this album, these people believe in something. If we look all the way back at “Thunder Road,” the very beginning of Born to Run, couldn’t we say that the promise of the open road with someone you love is just another one of these doomed rationalizations?
Maybe it’s the case that, if the righteous power of the E Street Band had backed Springsteen on this one, we’d be able to read something optimistic in “Reason to Believe,” that it’s the story of people who find ways to preserve their dignity in spite of hardship. But we didn’t get those recordings, and maybe we never will, and so the best that we can do is interpret Nebraska from inside of its universe, getting ourselves in the space that Springsteen sings from on this record—meaning, one of isolation, with no way out. As a result, it’s everything that gets you to that place, rather than what you do once you’re there, that’s worth fighting.
LISTEN: