Perfect Pain: the Bruce Springsteen album Phoebe Bridgers became “obsessed” with
Every songwriter has to learn to be vulnerable when talking to their audience. Any listener can detect when someone’s being inauthentic in the first handful of lines, but if you earn respect over just a few lines of a song, you can hold them in the palm of your hand with the right idea. While Phoebe Bridgers is more likely to quote her own heart when penning her masterpieces, she started to learn the mechanics of making touching songs thanks to Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska.
Granted, it’s not like Bridgers and Springsteen are necessarily cut from the same cloth. Yes, they both write achingly honest music, but while Bridgers is more likely to peel back the layers of her own mind, Springsteen was a storyteller who wanted to give a home to unsavoury characters who never got a chance to achieve their dreams.
On albums like Born to Run, many of The Boss’ best lyrics advocate for those kids working dead-end jobs and praying for some form of escape away from nowhere little towns. By the end of the record, it’s unclear whether they achieve those goals, but it’s not to imagine that they’re off to somewhere better.
If that album was full of hope, Nebraska was one of his darkest endeavours. A lot of the people in these songs are either highly conflicted about their place in the world or are too far gone to save themselves, like the killer on death row on the title track or someone looking for closure with his parents and never getting it on ‘My Father’s House’.
It’s far from an easy listen, but Bridgers related to how Springsteen hit tracks like ‘Highway Patrolman’, telling Line of Best Fit, “I became obsessed with Nebraska after hearing ‘Highway Patrolman’, the romanticised idea of a guy going into solitude and recording this whole album on a four-track, especially as it was such a rock heavy-hitter doing that.”
Although Springsteen did have plans to make a full-band version of these songs, even they wouldn’t have done them justice. Clarence Clemons could play a mean saxophone and pull emotion out of the audience on tracks like ‘Jungleland’, but hearing Springsteen and his guitar throughout every track paints a certain picture of what all the songs are about.
Before anything else, this album is about loneliness, and hearing Springsteen by himself when performing each track is far better than having a group with him. He’s still got his traditional gruff voice, but considering how many of the tunes have to do with the seedy side of life, being alone gives him a chance to inhabit the characters in the same way that someone like Tom Waits could, even if it means adopting a more weathered voice on ‘Atlantic City’ or getting slightly manic on ‘State Trooper’.
More than anything, it’s raw, and that’s something that no amount of overdubs can make up for. Whether that’s listening to Bridgers’s odes to heartache on Punisher or Springsteen’s best work, no one can touch them when they show everyone the shape of their heart.
