Bruce Springsteen Talks About the Poetry on His Classic Album “Nebraska”

“I lived in this house exactly half a lifetime ago,” Bruce Springsteen says. It may not look like much, but this tiny bedroom in Colts Neck, New Jersey, still boasts its original orange rug and is where Springsteen created what he considers his masterpiece: the dark, mournful 10-song 1982 album “Nebraska.” “This is the room where it happened,” he says.

I saw her standing on the front lawn twirling her baton.
She and I were driving and ten innocent people were killed.
With a sawed-off .410 on his knee in Lincoln, Nebraska.
All the way to the Wyoming wilderness, I killed everything in my path.

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

The piece was written 42 years ago, during a time of great upheaval in Springsteen’s inner life. “I had hit some kind of personal wall that I didn’t even know I had,” he said. “It was my first real, serious depression where I realized, ‘Oh, I have to do something. ‘”

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

“Singing in front of 40,000 people, the rock ‘n’ roll drug is just an anesthetic,” Axelrod said.

“Yeah, it worked for me,” Springsteen said. “I think a lot of things work in your 20s. Your 30s are when you start becoming an adult. All of a sudden, you look around and you’re like, ‘Where’s everything? Where’s my house? Where’s my partner? Where’s the son or daughter that I thought I’d have someday?’ And you realize you don’t have any of that.

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

On a rented farm, he struggled to understand why his success had alienated him so much. “It’s all inside me,” he said. “You can take it and turn it into something positive, or it can destroy you.”

Author Warren Jaynes said, “There are records, films, books that come in through the back door instead of the front door. They come up through the trap door and stay with you in your life.”

Janes’ latest book, “Deliver Me from Nowhere,” offers a deep and moving reflection on the making of “Nebraska.”

Springsteen’s pain is rooted in a lonely childhood. “Here’s Bruce Springsteen making a record at the bottom of his life,” Jaynes said. “They were very poor. And he Bruce Springsteen. He felt that his past was complicating his present, and he wanted to be free from it.”

For Springsteen, liberation has always come through writing. He filled notebooks (“It’s funny, I don’t remember doing all this work!” he mutters, turning the pages), but the album wasn’t finished until he stumbled upon Terrence Malick’s “Badlands” late one night while flipping through the channels, about Charles Starkweather, who committed murders mostly in Nebraska in 1957 and 1958. “I actually called the reporter who had covered it in Nebraska,” he says. “She was still at the paper, to my surprise. She was a wonderful woman, and we talked for like a half hour. And I was able to just focus on the feeling I wanted to write about.”

Springsteen was inspired by serial killers.

We can’t say sorry for what we did
At least for a little while, sir, me and her, we had a good time…
They wanted to know why I did that.
Well, sir, it seems there are just bad things in this world.

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

“Yeah, I tried my best to find where their humanity was,” 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 them on a four-track cassette player. One of rock’s biggest stars, sitting alone in his bedroom, singing, got exactly the sound he was looking for.

And the acoustics? “It’s not bad,” Springsteen said. “The orange shag carpet is killer. There’s not a lot of reverb. It’s beautiful and convenient!”

Some songs explored the turmoil of childhood, such as “My Father’s House.”

I climbed the stairs and stood in the hallway.
A woman I don’t know came and spoke to me.
Through the chained door
I told her my story and who I had come for.
“I’m sorry, son, but there’s no one with that name,” she said.
“I don’t live here anymore”

“‘Mansion on the Hill,’ ‘My Father’s House,’ ‘Used Cars’ are all songs written from a child’s perspective, trying to understand the world that a child comes into,” Springsteen said.

Others have profiled adults who have been left behind or marginalized. Springsteen has argued that the music has a “very bleak, dark, lonely sound. Very austere, very bare bones.”

Springsteen mixed the songs on a broken boombox, stuffed them in his back pocket, and recorded them on cassette tape over a period of weeks. “I wish I had at least had a plastic case,” Axelrod says.

“I don’t think I had a case,” he replied. “I’m glad I didn’t lose my case!”

Springsteen’s band recorded what he had recorded on cassette, but bigger and bolder wasn’t what he was looking for. “It was a happy accident,” he says. “I was just going to write a few good songs, teach them to the band, and go into the studio and record them. But every time you try to improve on the tapes you made in that little room? It’s the same old story. If it gets better, it gets worse.”

Bruce Springsteen didn’t work on E Street, but on a completely different road. According to Janes, “‘Nebraska’ was muddy. It was incomplete. It wasn’t finished. It had all these things that shouldn’t have been put out there. that take out.”

Everything dies, baby, that’s true.
But maybe one day everything will return to death.
Put on some makeup and do your hair nicely
And see you tonight in Atlantic City

Axelrod asked, “What part of you was worried, ‘Oh my God, what am I putting out there?'”

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

Were there a few more songs that didn’t make the cut? You probably heard them later. There’s “Born in the USA,” “Pink Cadillac,” and “Downbound Train,” songs written by a guy in a leather jacket about a chrome-wheeled fuel-injected suicide machine that were kept in a binder with Snoopy on the cover.

In that tiny bedroom, rock singer Springsteen made an album that fattened up poet Springsteen. Imagine what it would have been like if he hadn’t done it. “Then people could evaluate your career and say, ‘Oh, that was great, 70,000 people sang ‘Rosalita’ in a stadium,'” Axelrod said. “But it could have been closer to home, considering what you’ve done.”

“Yeah, I was just interested in something more, something more than that,” Springsteen said. “I loved doing it. I still love doing it. But I wanted more.”

“If they want you to enjoy your work, try anything. understand “Try ‘Nebraska’ at your workplace,” Axelrod asked.

“Yes, I would agree to that,” he answered. “I would definitely agree to that.”

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

Read an excerpt: “Deliver Me from Nowhere: The Making of Bruce Springsteen’s ‘Nebraska'”

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

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Story written by Jason Sacca. Edited by Ed Givnish.

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