Bruce Springsteen on how an orange shag carpet helped make ‘Nebraska’
Across just over two weeks in the dead of winter between 1981 and 1982, Bruce Springsteen holed himself up in his New Jersey home to record demos for his upcoming album. Inspired by the darker turn that tracks like ‘Stolen Car’ and ‘Wreck on the Highway’ had taken on his previous album, 1980’s The River, Springsteen recorded a series of pitch-black songs with just himself and a four-track recorder. Apart from some occasional overdubs, the stripped-down sound of the recordings appealed to Springsteen, who decided to release the recordings as his next studio album, 1982’s Nebraska.
As stark and minimalist as any album from a major rock star has ever been, Nebraska failed to match the commercial success of Springsteen’s previous releases. That’s not surprising, considering how anti-commercial the album and its production style are. Springsteen’s songs about murderers, burnouts, criminals, and lost souls were tough sells, and Springsteen would later look at the album as a defiant artistic triumph.
“If I had to pick one album out and say, ‘This is going to represent you 50 years from now’, I’d pick Nebraska,” Springsteen claimed.
More than 40 years after recording the album in a bedroom, Springsteen returned to the room with CBS Sunday Morning. “This is the orange shag rug that was here 40 years ago,” Springsteen beamed as he entered the room. “The orange shag carpet makes it really dead. There’s not a lot of echo. Not only was it beautiful but it came in handy,” Springsteen says with a good-natured laugh.
It was a completely different feeling than what he was going through when he recorded the album. “I just hit some sort of personal wall that I didn’t even know was there,” Springsteen claimed. “It was my first real major depression where I realised I’ve got to do something about it.”
Springsteen channelled his inner turmoil into the the bleak depicitons of Nebraska. When he returned to the house where the album was made, which he was renting at the time, Springsteen reflected warmly on the reservoir by the backyard, even joking that the overturned canoe at the water’s edge was the same one that was there more than four decades prior.
Springsteen wound up mixing down the four track recordings onto a broken-down boombox which captured the recordings onto a cassette tape. That cassette would be the master tape that became Nebraska, complete with tape hiss and lo-fi elements that were unheard of for someone with Springsteen’s stature. “I’m lucky I didn’t lose it,” Springsteen said after admitting that he carried around the cassette in his pocket for a number of weeks.
“It was a happy accident,” Springsteen says of the final results. “I had planned to just write some good songs, teach them to the band, go into the studio and record them. But every time I tried to improve on on the tape that I had made in that little room, it’s the old story of, ‘If this gets any better, it’s gonna be worse.'”
Watch Springsteen revisit the Nebraska house down below.
