By Julie F.

It’s 1982 and rock and roll musician Bruce Springsteen is reeling from triumph after triumph. He experienced phenomenal acclaim and commercial success with three successive albums (Born to Run, Darkness on the Edge of Town, and The River), two show-stopping worldwide tours with the E Street Band, and a massive hit single on the radio that’s still on the lips of his multitude of fans today – everybody’s got a hungry heart, right? But there were disappointments and challenges, too. A failed romantic relationship, as well as exhaustion from a bitter legal fight with his onetime manager, Mike Appel, left Bruce questioning the direction of the band and, more importantly, how he envisioned his future as an artist and songwriter.

1982 was a year of tremendous change in the music industry; MTV had launched in August of 1981, and Michael Jackson’s Thriller, still the best-selling album of all time, changed the way record producers thought about hit singles and short-form videos. Everything was splashy, colorful, and calculated to grab your attention. But Bruce had a different ethos altogether.

Enter Nebraska, with its black-and-white cover and photographs: Bruce’s album of rootlessness and isolation, a lonely place with a “dark highway where our sins lie unatoned,” as he says in the lyrics of “My Father’s House.” With its stripped-down sound and Woody Guthrie-esque lyrics, Bruce wanted to plumb the soul of rural American culture. He wrote about the forgotten and spiritually lost: from the Starkweather killings, to the decline of Atlantic City in his home state, to the inner musings of a worried police officer whose brother couldn’t stay out of trouble with the law. Originally recorded in his bedroom as a series of demos on a four-track TEAC recording machine, the album baffled a lot of people in the record industry and caused a few headaches for the engineers trying to mix those primitive tracks down into some semblance of a releasable recording. But when the band tried, and failed, to make the demos into E Street-style rock-and-roll anthems, Bruce knew that the tracks had to be released as they were. Warren Zanes was the guitarist for The Del Fuegos and a contemporary of Springsteen’s; as a writer who is also a musician, he does a wonderful job of telling the story of that process, with descriptions of the technical detail that are fascinating for music aficionados but which won’t overwhelm the casual reader.

Near the end, Zanes is discussing Elvis Presley and his impact on Springsteen as a child, and states that, “His [Presley’s] end would suggest that what might start as an American dream can become a deal gone very wrong” (273). Reading about how Springsteen wrestled with issues of identity and belonging, as well as personal depression, it’s clear that the songs on Nebraska were his attempt to reconcile his American dream – success and the freedom and escape that rock and roll represented – with the decline of the cultural touchstones like Presley who inspired him. As Zanes asks earlier in the book, “who should fight to expose all that was hidden from view?” (78). The answer is artists like Springsteen, driven by their artistry to answer our questions, expose our flaws and contradictions, and illuminate our common truths. He continues to do so today, decades into his journey as a musician and songwriter.

Author Warren Zanes looks not just at the making of Nebraska, but also at the cultural landscape it emerged from and the lasting impact it had on the musicians and fans with whom it resonated. Filled with interviews with musicians I admire – Rosanne Cash, Richard Thompson, and Dave Alvin, among others – as well as excerpts from Peter Ames Carlin’s Bruce and extensive interviews with Bruce himself, this is a well-researched and deeply thought-out tribute to a great album, one very specific to its moment and place in music history.

Deliver Me From Nowhere: The Making of Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska by Warren Zanes is available from HCLS in print.

Julie is an instructor and research specialist at HCLS Miller Branch who finds her work as co-editor of Chapter Chats very rewarding. She loves gardening, birds, crime fiction, all kinds of music, and the great outdoors.