Bruce Springsteen masterpiece ‘Nebraska’ turns 40
Bruce Springsteen album Nebraska explains the magnificence of his storytelling instincts throughout ten compelling vignettes. Springsteen used the Midwestern landscape as a backdrop to explore the tales of seedy characters who populate the state to make a concept album like no other.
‘The Boss’ has always been attracted to writing from the perspective of others and, typically, refrains from penning autobiographical songs. Yet despite Nebraska not overtly being about Springsteen’s own life, through carefully created protagonists – who he uses to tell deeply intricate and personal stories – the musician stokes universal feelings that rest inside all of us.
Nebraska surprised audiences considerably upon its release, and it marked an unexpected left-turn from Springsteen following the monumental success of The River. Everybody anticipated another FM Radio-friendly slab of anthemic rock, but Bruce had other ideas and stripped things back for his fifth album.
Springsteen didn’t make a deliberate decision to be a contrarian, but it was a decision born out of necessity. He had been attempting to write another traditional rock album to make with The E-Street Band, but nothing was coming naturally to him. After spending months trying to write his next album, Springsteen had finally accrued a collection of songs. Rather than bring them to the band, he instead decided to lay them down on a four-track cassette recorder which became Nebraska.
Due to the stripped-back nature of the album, Springsteen opted against touring the release. Nebraska was its own entity, and it would have been peculiar for intimate cuts like ‘Reason To Believe’ and ‘Mansion On The Hill’ to sit next to brooding efforts from Born To Run.
Nebraska is a legacy-defining album that showed Springsteen could translate his songwriting into a sombre territory and proved there was much more in his arsenal of tools than people first suspected. With that, he didn’t need a slither of assistance on the self-produced project either, as no other musician played on it.
‘Atlantic City’ is the album’s most notable track and perfectly epitomises the record’s broad theme. It captures a young couple as they flee to the location of the same name after amassing debts owed to the mafia, a sum which needed to be paid off by carrying out unspeakable acts. Yet, despite the life-threatening danger that lies ahead, there’s an underlying message of love which fuels the couple, and the same goes for the rest of Nebraska.
The characters that feature across Nebraska are not the people you naturally root for. Still, somehow, Springsteen manages to make you relate to these loathsome individuals by stripping them back to their core of humanity. In a later interview with NME, Springsteen explained why he finds himself writing about unlikable figures. “You’re not trying to recreate the experience, your trying to recreate the emotions and the things that went into the action being taken,” he said. “Those are things that everyone understands, those are things that everyone has within them”.
Continuing, Springsteen explained: “The action is the symptom, that’s what happened, but the things that caused that action to happen, that’s what everyone knows about – you know about it, I know about it. It’s inside of every human being. Those are the things you gotta mine, that’s the well that you gotta dip into and, if you’re doing that, you’re going to get something central and fundamental about those characters.”
Admittedly, Nebraska is a challenging listen, and unlike the majority of Springsteen’s work, there isn’t an immediacy to it. However, there’s a reward waiting for the listener for persevering and investing ample time to get lost in each of Springsteen’s heartbreaking collection of tracks. While Nebraska isn’t a suitable companion for driving down the highway with the roof down, there are few more fitting albums in those tender, reflective moments we occasionally find ourselves.
