Bruce Springsteen revisits ‘Nebraska’ bedroom in New Jersey
After years of playing one massive gig after the next, Bruce Springsteen returned to the New Jersey apartment where he composed the music for what would become Nebraska. The song and album would be one of Springsteen’s most intimate records and one of the first that he made without the help of the E Street Band.
When speaking about the apartment to Rolling Stone, The Boss mentioned that the carpet on the floor helped with the acoustics of the record, joking: “The orange shag carpet makes it really dead”. Springsteen went on to discuss how he wrote the title track, which had to do with the infamous murderer Charles Starkweather.
As he reminisced, Springsteen remembers getting in touch with the woman who reported on the murders, recalling, “amazingly enough she was still at the newspaper, and she was a lovely woman, and we talked for a half hour or so”.
Springsteen’s trek back to his stomping grounds coincides with Warren Zane’s book Deliver Me From Nowhere: The Story of Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska, which sets out to explore the album in more depth. Amid the interviews, Springsteen said he never intended to make the album that bare, noting, “I had planned to just write some good songs, take it to the band, go in the studio and record it. But every time I tried to improve on the tape that I made in that little room, it was the old story of ‘If this gets any better, it’s gonna get worse'”.
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