User:Zmbro/Nebraska (album)

Nebraska
Studio album by Bruce Springsteen
Released	September 30, 1982 (1982-09-30)
Recorded	December 17, 1981, to January 3, 1982, except "My Father's House", May 25, 1982
Studio	Springsteen's home in Colts Neck, New Jersey
Genre	Folk folk rock heartland rock lo-fi country
Length	41:02
Label	Columbia
Producer	Mike Batlan (engineer)
Bruce Springsteen chronology
The River (1980) Nebraska (1982) Born in the U.S.A. (1984)
Singles from Nebraska
"Atlantic City" Released: October 8, 1982 (Europe and Japan only) "Open All Night" Released: November 22, 1982 (Europe only)

Nebraska is the sixth studio album by the American singer-songwriter Bruce Springsteen, released on September 30, 1982, by Columbia Records. Springsteen recorded the songs as demos on a 4-track recorder, intending to rerecord them with the E Street Band, but decided to release them as they were.

The songs on Nebraska deal with ordinary, down-on-their-luck blue-collar characters who face a challenge or a turning point in their lives. The songs also address the subject of outsiders, criminals and mass murderers with little hope for the future—or no future at all—as in the title track, where the main character is sentenced to death in the electric chair. Unlike previous albums, which often exude energy, youth, optimism and joy, the vocal tones of Nebraska are solemn and thoughtful, with fleeting moments of grace and redemption woven through the lyrics.

Background and development

Bruce Springsteen's fifth studio album The River was released in October 1980. The album, his first to top the U.S. Billboard Top LPs & Tape chart, and supporting tour brought Springsteen and the E Street Band their largest amount of commercial success yet. Nevertheless, his newfound attention led him to look inward about his role as an entertainer. Springsteen later explained that The River's success led to him dealing with "very conflicted feelings about being so separate from the people that I'd grown up around and that I wrote about". At the end of the tour, he retreated to his newly-rented ranch in Colts Neck, New Jersey, in September 1981.

Living isolated in Colts Neck, Springsteen engrossed himself in American history, reading books and watching films in search of stories to use for songwriting. Books he read included Joe Klein's biography on Woody Guthrie (1980), Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States (1980), The Pocket History of the United States, and Ron Kovic's autobiography Born on the Fourth of July (1976), while films he watched included Terrence Malick's Badlands (1973) and Ulu Grosbard's True Confessions (1981). Springsteen also began reflecting on his own childhood and studied the romans noirs of James M. Cain and Jim Thompson, the Gothic short stories of Flannery O'Connor, and the music of folk singer-songwriters Guthrie, Bob Dylan, and Hank Williams. Songs written during the period featured stories ranging from Springsteen's childhood to ones about criminals and violence, as well as one about a Vietnam veteran returning home from the war to an unenthusiastic response.

Recording

Colts Neck

Annoyed at how long it took him to record in the studio, Springsteen decided to record the new songs as solo demos, intending to rerecord them with the E Street Band – Roy Bittan (piano), Clarence Clemons (saxophone), Danny Federici (organ), Garry Tallent (bass), Steven Van Zandt (guitar), and Max Weinberg (drums) – at a later date. He later told the author Warren Zanes: "The recordings were just meant to get us a jump start on work in the studio with the band. I'd always spent a lot of time writing in the studio. I was trying to be more efficient, I guess. Certainly trying to spend a little less money."

Springsteen tasked his guitar technician, Mike Batlan, with buying a simple tape recorder to work out some demos and tinker with arrangements. Batlan picked up a four-track TEAC Tascam Portastudio 144 recorder, a then-relatively new device that allowed musicians to perform a basic track first before adding additional parts on the remaining tracks. Springsteen believed these overdubbed instruments would help the band understand how the final track should sound. He and Batlan set the recorder up in the bedroom of his Colts Neck home. They connected the machine to two Shure SM57 microphones on stands. Springsteen played a Gibson J-200 acoustic guitar, overdubbing harmonica, percussion, mandolin, and glockenspiel. The demos were recorded between December 17, 1981, to January 3, 1982. Most of the basic tracks (vocals and acoustic guitar) were finished in four to six takes.

Springsteen and Batlan mixed the sound by plugging the recorder into an Echoplex, a tape delay effects machine, and using an old Panasonic boombox, recently water-logged, as a mix-down deck to bring the final mix onto a cassette tape. In his 2003 book Songs, Springsteen stated he wanted to record this way because he "found the atmosphere in the studio to be sterile and isolating". Fifteen songs were recorded on the initial cassette tape: "Bye Bye Johnny", "Starkweather"/"Nebraska", "Atlantic City", "Mansion on the Hill", "Born in the U.S.A.", "Johnny 99", "Downbound Train", "Losin' Kind", "State Trooper", "Used Cars", "Wanda (Open All Night)", "Child Bride", "Pink Cadillac", "Highway Patrolman", and "Reason to Believe".

Following mixing, Springsteen sent the tape to his manager-producer Jon Landau with two pages of handwritten notes about arrangements and mixes. According to the biographer Peter Ames Carlin, Landau was "impressed by the power of the songs' minimalist narratives" and the "yelping desperation in the performances". Springsteen recorded two more songs at Colts Neck using the same recording methods: "The Big Payback", between March and April, and "My Father's House", on May 25.

Attempted rerecordings

See also: Electric Nebraska and Born in the U.S.A.

In April 1982, Springsteen and the E Street Band rehearsed the demos at Bittan's house before regrouping at the Power Station in New York City, where The River had been recorded, to rerecord them for release on the next album. The band spent two weeks attempting full-band arrangements of the Colts Neck tracks but Springsteen and his co-producers—Landau, Van Zandt, and Chuck Plotkin—were dissatisfied with the results. Springsteen, in particular, felt the full-band versions failed to capture the spirit of the demos, while Plotkin blamed the studio's "tendency to conventionalize sounds". Other songs from the tape, including "Born in the U.S.A.", "Downbound Train", "Child Bride" (rewritten as "Working on the Highway"), "Pink Cadillac", and "Bye Bye Johnny", proved successful in full-band arrangements. Continuing into May, the band also recorded newly-written songs absent from the tape, including "Glory Days", "I'm Goin' Down", and "I'm on Fire".

Despite the band's productivity and excitement about the recorded material, Springsteen remained focused on the rest of the Colts Neck songs. Attached to the cassette's "authentic" sound, he carried the cassette with him in his jeans pocket, unsure of what to do with the material. Realizing the tracks would not work in full-band arrangements, a decision was made to release the demos as is, tasking the engineer Toby Scott with mastering the recordings. Van Zandt insisted Springsteen release them as they were, saying: "The fact that you didn't intend to release it makes it the most intimate record you'll ever do. This is an absolutely legitimate piece of art." Springsteen briefly considered releasing a double album of acoustic and electric songs before deciding to release the acoustic ones on their own to give them "greater stature". The album, titled Nebraska, became Springsteen's first and only album he made without knowing he was making a record.

Springsteen's fans have long speculated whether the full-band recordings of the Nebraska material, nicknamed Electric Nebraska, will ever surface. Two years after the album's release, Springsteen clarified in an interview with Rolling Stone: "A lot of its content was in its style, in the treatment of it. It needed that really kinda austere, echoey sound, just one guitar—one guy telling his story." In a 2006 interview, Landau said that their release is unlikely because "the right version of Nebraska came out". Nevertheless, in a 2010 interview with Rolling Stone, Weinberg praised the full band renditions of the album as "killing" and "very hard-edged".

Mastering

Mastering the Nebraska demos proved problematic due to how Springsteen and Batlan recorded them. According to Classic Rock Review: "The original demos were not recorded at optimal volume or with optimal noise reduction, and it was extremely difficult to transfer such recordings to vinyl." For weeks, Plotkin and Scott attempted to transfer the recordings to the mixing console in the Power Station with no success. Attempts at remixing Springsteen and Batlan's original mixes also failed. Plotkin and Scott eventually took the tape to different mastering facilities, with failed attempts by the mastering engineers Bob Ludwig, Steve Marcussen, and Greg Calbi. The final master was made at New York City's Atlantic Studios by Dennis King, who was able to resolve the tape's low recording volume with noise reduction techniques. In a 2007 interview, Scott explained: "[W]e ended up having Bob Ludwig use his EQ and his mastering facility, but with Dennis [King's] mastering parameters. And that's the master we ended up using."

Music and lyrics

I wanted black bedtime stories. I thought of the records of John Lee Hooker and Robert Johnson, music that sounded so good with the lights out. I wanted the listener to hear my characters think, to feel their thoughts, their choices.

—Bruce Springsteen, Songs, 2003

Nebraska represented a major stylistic departure for Springsteen, although several songs from The River foreshadowed its direction, including "Stolen Car", "The River", and "Wreck On the Highway". Featuring only himself, it is a minimalist, folk record, with folk rock, heartland rock, lo-fi, and country influences. Many commentators have described its music and lyrics as "stark". AllMusic's William Ruhlmann called the recordings themselves "unpolished" and sounding unfinished; Consequence of Sound's Bill See noted the numerous "imperfections" in the mix, including "the creaking of a chair, the "P's" that pop, the over-modulated harmonicas and Jimmy Rogers-like howls that pin the VU meters". Joe Pelone of punknews.org argues that the album's lo-fi nature gives the songs a "hazy atmosphere" that "forces listeners to imagine more about what's going on, creating sounds that aren't there". Springsteen explained: "My Nebraska songs were the opposite of the rock music I'd been writing. These new songs were narrative, restrained, linear, and musically minimal. Yet their depiction of characters out on the edge contextualized them as rock and roll."

Quote (Songs): "If there's a theme that runs through the record, it's the thin line between stability and that moment when time stops and everything goes to black, when the things that connect you to your world–your job, your family, friends, your faith, the love and grace in your heart–fail you."

Margotin/Guesdon

• "Springsteen alternates between fatalism and determination, singing of the dark everyday life of blue-collar and itinerant workers, and the suffering of America's rural poor"
• childhood ("Mansion on the Hill", "Used Cars", and "My Father's House")

Pitchfork

• "“State Trooper” also illustrates how the automobile, central to Springsteen’s work throughout his career, functions a bit differently on Nebraska. On Born to Run, the car represented escape, while on Darkness on the Edge of Town and parts of The River it was used to define boundaries, to mark the places where the dramas of life unfold. On Nebraska, the automobile is a kind of isolation chamber, a steel husk that keeps its passengers apart from the world."

Louder:

• "The gentle irony in that is that many of the songs put its protagonist behind the wheel of an automobile. They survey the people and places they encounter, traveling as lost souls looking for connection as the world goes whizzing by."
• "The songs pit people in situations of utter despair, but no judgement is proffered. In fact, their predicaments are steeped in humanity that’s often relatable. These are mostly ordinary, everyday folks who have been pushed to the brink and driven to committing unspeakable acts."
• "At its core, Nebraska underlines the fragility of the American dream and the pillars relied on in life – work, love, family and friends – to stay grounded. It’s a record that ponders what happens when those pillars crumble down and there’s nowhere left to turn."

Pond

• "It is a portrait painted with old tools: a few acoustic guitars, a four-track cassette deck, a vocabulary derived from the plain-spoken folk music of Woody Guthrie and the dark hillbilly laments of Hank Williams. The style is steadfastly, defiantly out-of-date, the singing flat and honest, the music stark, deliberate and unadorned."
• "The album’s honest men — and they outnumber its criminals, though side one’s string of bloodletters suggests otherwise — are all paying debts and looking for deliverance that never comes."

CoS

• "unrepentant murderers, small-time thieves, disenfranchised night crawlers driving around all night at their wit’s end."
• "Springsteen not only casts these lost souls as working class, but he has them speak in a specifically old world kind of working class dialect. The use of “sir” or “son” brilliantly illustrates how they have accepted their subservient role in a kind of institutionalized lower class."
• "the core of the characters of Nebraska. Folks that are trying to do it the right way but for a variety of reasons: fate, bad luck, a moment of impulse, the economy, the debts keep piling up that no honest man can pay. And at the end of the day, there’s a little more behind why they did what they did than simply: bad guys do bad things."

"The Nebraska characters appear unrelentingly caught in deep existential crises, facing the stark awareness that their lives are devoid of meaning, and desperate, as is the narrator of "State Trooper", to be delivered "from nowhere"."

Sheeler

• "The songs in this collection would be stark recollections about life on the other side of the American Dream. This album was a harsh and unflinching look at American life through the eyes of outlaws, poor folk, estranged families, and other unseemly characters."

Influences

One of Springsteen's primary influences when writing the Nebraska songs was the writings of Flannery O'Connor.

The author and critic Dave Marsh says that Springsteen became impressed by the "minute-precision" of O'Connor's prose and believes that he had felt that his songwriting had been too vague, too "dreamlike".

CoS: "In the latter stages of The River tour, it was the influence of film and literature that compelled Springsteen to start digging deeper into the darker corners of the everyman’s plight: John Ford’s adaptation of John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, John Huston’s cinematic version of Flannery O’Connor’s novel Wise Blood and Joe Klein’s book, Woody Guthrie: A Life."; had begun working solo Guthrie songs into the setlists during the later shows

• "What Springsteen gleaned from the songs of Woody Guthrie, the writings of O’Connor and Steinbeck and filmmakers like Ford, Huston and Terrence Mallick was a humanity and a curiosity about why certain people lose connection with themselves, their families, their community, their government. And what then happens when that kind of alienation infiltrates the subconscious. Further, the profound effect that has on the people that love those alienated and disconnected souls."

"Some of the songs were inspired by the left-wing historian Howard Zinn and his book A People's History of the United States" (influence can be heard on "Mansion on the Hill" and "Johnny 99")

• To Kill a Mockingbird (1962) and The Night of the Hunter (1955) for "Mansion on the Hill"

• (from Streight) "Marsh comments that Springsteen wanted to write songs that were more detailed and concrete, away from the "clash and babble of metaphor" occasionally evidenced in the lyrics on his previous albums".

• Her Catholicism was also an influence. Springsteen stated in Songs: "Her stories reminded me of the unknowability of God and contained a dark spirituality that resonated with my own feelings at the time."
• Geoffrey Himes noted that O'Connor wrote some of her stories from a child's perspective, which inspired Springsteen to write songs in a similar manner. Springsteen himself stated that the songs from the period were more "connected" to his childhood than ever before; with "Mansion on the Hill", "Used Cars", and "My Father's House", these were "stories that came directly out of my experience with my family".
• "Nebraska: inspired by short story "A Good Man Is Hard to Find"
• Wise Blood informed the behavior of the narrator in "State Trooper"

Quote: "There was something in those stories of hers that I felt captured a certain part of the American character that I was interested in writing about. They were a big, big revelation. She got to the heart of some part of meanness that she never spelled out, because if she spelled it out you wouldn’t be getting it. It was always at the core of every one of her stories–the way she left that hole there, that hole that's inside of everybody. There was some dark thing–a component of spirituality–that I sensed in her stories, and that set me off exploring characters of my own."

Guardian: "Nebraska displayed his growing fascination with American folk music and with diving deeper into the lives of the people he sang about, whose alienation had taken them beyond despair and outside the boundaries of society."

Side one

The opening track, "Nebraska", tells the story of the killer Charles Starkweather, who murdered ten people from 1957 to 1958 between Nebraska and Wyoming while traveling with his girlfriend Caril Ann Fugate. After his capture, Starkweather is sentenced to death by electric chair but remains unrepentant, blaming his actions on the "meanness" of the world. Springsteen wrote the song after watching Badlands, a film about the couple, and reading the Ninette Beaver book Caril (1974). The song is sung from a first-person perspective; Springsteen said in 2005 that "everyone knows what it is like to be condemned". The song's music is described as "gentle" and "soothing".

"Atlantic City"

• mob wars in the titular city
• "Bruce Springsteen's tale about New Jersey's gambling problems, the underhandedness of revenging loan sharks, and the seep of corruption and immorality that infiltrated Atlantic City was never released as single, nor were any of the tracks off 1982's Nebraska. The album would prove to be some of Springsteen's darkest recordings, sung into a lone tape recorder with a solely acoustic backdrop, which in turn added to the album's somberness. With the harmonica and guitar sounding like they're his only friends, "Atlantic City" has Springsteen playing the desperate character once again, stooping as low as the hoodlums he despises by doing "a little favor for them" so he can free himself of debt and run away from his dismal lifestyle. With escapism personified in the form of his girlfriend, Springsteen's song sounds woefully effective, with hints of Bob Dylan cropping up in the vocals, the harmonica, and even in the guitar. The bleakness is front and center, and the song's mood never fades from disparaging because it was never intended to, a skill of Springsteen's that was mastered on his Darkness on the Edge of Town album four years earlier. Just like "Atlantic City," Nebraska instills a harrowing, almost pitiful feel to its makeup, but it's this song that seems to score the deepest impression."
• "It tells the story of a young couple relocating because the young man grew tired of trying unsuccessfully to make an honest living and is taking a job with the mob in Atlantic City. It was written right around the time when the city was looking towards big-time gaming to save the city in the early eighties."
• the Chicken Man from Philly referred to mafia boss Philip Testa, who was murdered in 1981.
• "Springsteen evokes Atlantic City in the early 1980s"; the narrator has no choice but to go to the city with his girlfriend to pay off his debts – he cannot find a job and is forced to join the mob
• "dense atmosphere and the performance's feeling or urgency"

"Mansion on the Hill"

• "Taking a classic American image (both Hank Williams and Neil Young have written songs with the same title), Springsteen creates a pensive, almost dirge-like ballad, one which showcases Springsteen's "Woody Guthrie" persona to its best and most developed. The song comprises a series of simple verses. The first begins, "There's a place down on the edge of town, sir/Rising above the factories and the fields/Ever since I was a child I can remember/That mansion on the hill." The artist writes with the economy and tightness of a poet, and resembles Hemingway in style. As typical on this album, the backing is sparse and lean, with only Springsteen's acoustic guitar fingerpicking the chords and the occasional burst of harmonica. The song is successful in that it's both heartbreaking and defiant, and is arguably one of Springsteen's finest moments as a lyricist. The artist regularly performs the song in concert, augmenting the melody with a gorgeous pedal steel guitar line on his Reunion tour, although there have been no notable cover versions of the song."
• title taken from a Hank Williams song of the same name; song evokes Springsteen's childhood memories, remembering a large house on top of a hill that piqued his curiosity, and car rides with his father
• "A spellbinding, hypnotic atmosphere, filled with emotion and restraint"
• "The lyrics describe a mansion that both rises above and looms over the rest of the town. The narrator remembers parking with his father and looking up at the mansion; in summers, he and his sister hid in cornfields and listened to rich people having fun at parties inside the house."

"Johnny 99"

• the narrator is laid off from his job at the Ford assembly plant in Mahwah, New Jersey, who takes out his frustration by murdering a hotel clerk; he is sentenced to 99 years in prison and begs for the death penalty
• Unlike the murderer in "Nebraska", the perpetrator on "Johnny 99" shows remorse for his action, saying he is "better off dead" due to his large debts and a house being foreclosed

• "describes an act of murder that is the product of blinding desperation"
• ""Johnny 99" exemplified Bruce Springsteen's songwriting interests in the early '80s, as expressed on his bare-bones album Nebraska (1982). Issued as a collection of demos recorded at home, the album was full of songs about desperate people in desperate circumstances, many of them on the wrong side of the law. Like the title song, "Johnny 99" was about a murderer; like "Atlantic City," it was about a man who had "debts no honest man could pay," a line employed in both sets of lyrics. The song, which Springsteen played on acoustic guitar, had the style of an early country ballad, but from the first line it was located in Mahwah, NJ, where a laid-off auto worker gets drunk and shoots a night clerk. In the second verse, he is apprehended, and the rest of the song takes place in the courtroom where Johnny is sentenced to an "even" 99 years in jail. He cites ameliorating circumstances in his statement to the judge, but in the end pleads for execution instead of a life in prison. Springsteen gave the song a raucous performance that began with lonely falsetto wails and ended with exuberant falsetto shouts."
• a rock'n'roll/rockabilly rhythm with echoed vocals with an ambient atmosphere

"Highway Patrolman"

• tells the story of an honest police officer named Joe Roberts who "puts his family above his duty by letting his no-good brother escape to Canada to avoid standing trial for a shooting."
• "a cop protects his violent brother even though doing so goes against everything he believes"
• "Arguably the finest song on Nebraska, "Highway Patrolman" is one of Springsteen's greatest narratives, a story of "blood on blood," about the ties of family and the bond between family members. One of the first songs written for the album, it tells the story of Joe Roberts, a highway patrolman who, after seeing his brother commit a terrible crime, is faced with a dilemma to either do his job and chase after him and arrest him (or worse), or to let him go. Roberts decides to do the latter, and, as Springsteen argues in the song's heartbreaking chorus, "Man turns his back on his family/Well, he just ain't no good." As with most songs on the album, the song is a masterpiece of Springsteen's storytelling, yet it has an emotional potency that many of the other songs on the album do not have. It is easy to relate to the choice Joe Roberts has to make, and the listener feels genuine sympathy with him, due to the beauty of Springsteen's wordcraft and the compassionate voice in which he sings the song." reword; mostly same points in Kirkpatrick "Joe chases him to within five miles of the Canadian border; realizing Frankie intends to flee the country, Joe pulls to the side of the road and lets him go, watching the taillights of the Buick disappear in the night."
• "juxtaposes the duty to carry out the law with the blood ties of family loyalty."
• "continues the themes of crimes and conscience in the story of brothers – one a lawman, one a criminal. The story is once again told in the first person with the lawman constantly struggling to keep his brother out of trouble and in the end letting him escape after he kills a man in a barroom fight."

"State Trooper"

• "Nebraska's atmosphere reduced to its essence, just an ominous repeating guitar and a voice that sounds like a howling ghost."
• "contains a guitar pattern which emulates the recurring sound of the road. The protagonist doesn’t have a license or registration, but he is driving late at night on a deserted highway just saying a prayer that his problems don’t get bigger by being stopped by a cop."
• directly influenced by "Frankie Teardrop" by the synth-punk band Suicide "with its pumping, monotonous bass line drone and howling, distorted vocals."
• lo-fi folk;
• follows an outlaw on the run; he becomes more paranoid with each passing mile; one of the album's more barebone tracks, with only voice and guitar
• told from the POV of a car thief; the verses end with the driver's plea to a state trooper—either real or imaginary—not to stop him as he drives through the night on the New Jersey Turnpike

Side two

"Used Cars"

• "the singer watches his father buy another clunker and makes a vow as heartfelt as it is heartbreakingly hollow"
• "One of the most minor songs on Nebraska is "Used Cars." A simple elegy to a life that could have been, and a reflection of the current reality, the song's narrator repeats to himself, "Well mister, the day the lottery I win/I ain't never gonna ride in no used car again." The song boasts a very attractive melody and a lovely, lilting vocal from Springsteen, yet it fails to engage the listener with the narrator as effectively as many of the other songs on the album do. Like many of the characters on the album, the narrator longs for escape ("I wish he'd just hit the gas and let out a cry/And tell 'em they can kiss our asses goodbye") but is clinging to a last hope, a win on the lottery, to escape this reality. Subtle guitar work (with, rarely found on Nebraska, a guitar overdub) serves to highlight the melody of the song, although the songs on Nebraska live and die by their lyrics, and "Used Cars" therefore can only be considered a minor part of the album. Springsteen rarely performs the song in concert, and it has not spawned any major recordings by other artists."
• "a comparatively gentle song inspired by Springsteen’s own life, finds a child experiencing the shame of class difference. The family is each inhabiting their own world, the father and son unable to connect and share with each other what they might be feeling in the moment. The boy knows only by what he sees, not what his father tells him; the father, consumed with his own shame, has no sense of the boy’s experiences."
• "the child goes with his folks to buy yet another used car because new cars are not what his kind can afford or qualify to buy on credit. The salesman notices his “old man’s hands” are hard-working hands, and the child confirms his dad sweats the same job every day; that his mom walks the same streets where he was born: a continuum with seemingly no way out. The kid takes it all in and swears the day his number comes in, he’s “never gonna ride in no used car again.”"
• a return to Springsteen's childhood; describes not only his own father's day-to-day life, but the "that of the most vulnerable social classes in 1950s and 1960s America"
• "In “Used Cars,” the singer remembers the family’s purchase of a used car and, more importantly, the humbling nature of the experience. The salesman stares at the father’s hands, undoubtedly worn from years of manual labor, which have nevertheless left him with little income. (The salesman says he wishes he could give the family a break on the car’s price.) After buying the car, the “neighbors come from near and far” to see the family drive in their “brand new used car.” The paradoxical description of the car hints at the complexity of the scenario: the mix of pride felt in purchasing an automobile, and shame at having the purchase of a used car be a celebratory moment. Shame triumphs over the singer, whom we can picture cringing as he walks alone and hears his little sister blowing the horn of the car, “The sounds echoin’ all down Michigan Avenue.” In the end, he clings to a bitter, unrealistic dream of winning the lottery, after which he vows, “I ain’t ever gonna ride in no used car again.”"

"Open All Night"

• "takes a chugging Chuck Berry rhythm and melody and sets a Chuck Berry protagonist and his automobile down on the Jersey Turnpike"
• ""Open All Night" is ... quite detached from the somber mood of the rest of album. The song is the closest Springsteen ever got to a Chuck Berry-style rave-up, with wonderfully frenetic verses and enthusiastic guitar playing making this a breathtaking listen, a truly great up-tempo song to prevent the listener from getting too bogged down in the (admittedly brilliant) ballads that dominate the rest of the album. Simultaneously an elegy to that great Springsteen love, the car, and an "evening in the life of...," this song sees Springsteen constructing verses that are almost overflowing with words, and delivering lines like "Well, at 5 a.m. oil pressure's sinkin' fast/Take a pit stop, check the windshield, check the gas/Gotta call my baby on the telephone/Let her know that her daddy's comin' on home." It is the sheer joy in Springsteen's voice that makes this song such a delight (he even laughs in a couple of spots) -- he even gets away with a few yelps in the bridge. Certainly one of the most successful songs on Nebraska, it is also a song which seems like typical Springsteen, but never in his considerable catalog do you encounter a song that is as much fun to listen to as this. It is hard to call an essentially "fun" song such as this a masterpiece, but it isn't far off."
• inspired by an unnamed short story by William Price Fox; rock song with a Chuck Berry rhythm
• "The song is light-heartedly serious: the singer repeats the prayer to be delivered from nowhere, but here the prayer is offered to the local deejay, asking for rock ’n’ roll music to provide company on the remaining three hours of his drive. This is a more serious concern than the state trooper he passes while speeding by; even though the trooper hits his “party light,” the singer simply says, “Goodnight, good luck, one two power shift” and leaves him behind in the middle of the song."

"My Father's House"

• "a devastating capper to Springsteen's cycle of "father" songs, the house is a sanctuary only in the singer's dreams. When he awakens, he finds that his father is gone, that the house sits at the end of a highway "where our sins lie unatoned.""
• another song about Springsteen's childhood; references to Night of the Hunter and the Jersey Devil
• The narrator has a dream in which, as a child, he is saved by his father from dark forces in a forest; upon waking up, the narrator decides to reconcile with his estranged father
• upon arriving to his father's house, the narrator finds he no longer lives there, with his dreams of making peace with his father now crushed
• a "sad, introverted, and moving" mood

"Reason to Believe"

• the four verses introduce four separate characters: "One man stands alongside a highway, poking a dead dog as if to revive it; another heads down to the river to wed. The bride never shows, the groom stands waiting, the river flows on, and people, Bruce sings with faintly befuddled respect, still find their reasons to believe."
• "Unlike the Tim Hardin composition, a complex love lyric, Springsteen's "Reason to Believe" is about religious faith, or perhaps just faith in the value of continuing to live. And it suggests that that faith is misplaced. Throughout his songwriting career, Springsteen had struggled with the conflict between the hopes and dreams possessed by his characters and himself, and the actual reality in which they lived. By the time of Nebraska, he was writing about people driven to murder and other crimes. "Reason to Believe," the album's final song, brought the collection to a powerfully negative conclusion. In four verses, a narrator tells four short stories: a man pokes a dead dog on a highway as if it would come back to life; a woman waits at the end of a road for a man who left her a long time ago; a child is born and a man (perhaps the child grown old) dies; and a groom waits for a bride who has stood him up. At the end of each verse, the narrator says that it strikes him as funny that people find some reason to believe. Clearly, he isn't laughing, but as Springsteen narrators go, he has passed beyond the troubled character concerned with life's struggles and betrayals in Born to Run and also beyond the existentialist who took comfort in individual endeavor in Darkness on the Edge of Town and The River to a nihilist who views life as futile and ridiculous. By the end of Nebraska, Springsteen has no "Reason to Believe," and he bitterly mocks those who find one. The song is the devastating end to a powerfully depressing album."
• what is the song saying?: "we need a reason to believe, for without one life is only a series of bitter disappointments—in particular, waiting for someone who will never come—until we are plunged into eternal nothingness"
• the performances emits "sorrow and fatalism"
• "The point in “Reason to Believe”—and, in fact, throughout the entire album—is that people endure, that they struggle against all evidence to the contrary, because it’s the only thing that they can do—or else they end up dead, spiritually or literally."
• "This final song seeks to resolve the litanies of meanness, desperation, hopelessness, and longing recounted in the preceding stories, and to resolve them in a decidedly Catholic fashion."

Artwork and packaging

The cover artwork of Nebraska is a black-and-white photograph of a black-top road under a cloudy sky taken through the windshield of a car. The photograph was originally taken by the landscape photographer David Michael Kennedy during the winter of 1975. Springsteen did not want himself on the cover, instead envisioning a landscape. Kennedy was hired by the art director Andrea Klein after showing Springsteen some of Kennedy's work. Kennedy provided various images before Springsteen selected the final one. Commentators have agreed that the artwork matches the album's tone and mood perfectly. The singer's name and album title appear in bright red all caps above and below the image, respectively. Springsteen said of the image:

"I liked the photograph [Klein] found and what was done with it, just the stark red-and-black, black-and-white layout, and the big letters. It was all just very bloody in its own way. I remember a lot of work, a lot of fussing over many of the album covers, but I don't remember Nebraska being one of them."

The back of the sleeve contains a photograph of Springsteen taken by Kennedy in a brightly lit room. Springsteen said he wanted his presence both known and unknown: "The picture we used inside, it was kind of my ghost. It wasn't quite me. It was ... the earlier part of yourself that stays with you." The inside sleeve includes lyrics of the album's ten songs.

Release

Columbia and CBS Records were ecstatic when Springsteen and Landau provided Nebraska to them. The labels' presidents, Walter Yetnikoff and Al Teller, respectively, believed the album would not sell as well as The River, but loved the music and felt it represented an artistic growth for Springsteen. Teller promised a more subdued advertising campaign compared to The River and anticipated sales of less than one million copies.

Nebraska was released on September 30, 1982, at a time when the charts were dominated by artists such as Olivia Newton-John, the Human League, and Survivor. It stylistically stood apart from other releases in the year from artists such as A Flock of Seagulls, Stray Cats, and Lionel Richie. It confused both casual and serious fans, but debuted on the U.S. Billboard Top LPs & Tape chart at number 29, peaking at number three. By 1989, it had sold one million copies and was certified platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). Elsewhere, the album peaked at number two in Sweden, three in Canada, Norway, New Zealand, and the U.K., seven in the Netherlands, eight in Australia, and ten in Japan. It also reached number 18 in France and 37 in West Germany.

Nebraska was supported by two singles. The first, "Atlantic City", with "Mansion on the Hill" as the B-side, was released in Europe and Japan only on October 8, 1982. Springsteen's first ever music video was produced as promotion for rotation on MTV. Directed by Arnold Levine, the "Atlantic City" video does not feature Springsteen himself, instead featuring black-and-white documentary-style footage of the titular city shot on location. Commentators have described the video as "bleak" and "atmospheric". "Open All Night" was released as the second single, again in Europe only, on November 22, 1982. Its B-side was "The Big Payback", a rockabilly song with lyrics related to working life.

Springsteen himself did not promote the album; he conducted no interviews and, for the first time after an album release, did not tour. In his 2016 autobiography Born to Run, he explained that "it felt too soon after The River, and Nebraska's quiet stillness would take me a while longer to bring to the stage". He also stated that he wanted listeners to experience the album for themselves: "I thought I could only hurt the project at that moment by trying to explain it ... if I could explain it."

Following Nebraska's release, Springsteen vacationed on a cross-country road trip to California, taping several new demos at his newly-purchased home in Los Angeles before returning to New York to continue recording with the E Street Band. Sessions lasted until February 1984, during which the band recorded between 70 to 90 songs. The follow-up to Nebraska, Born in the U.S.A., was released in June 1984. It featured full-band arrangements of three songs from the original Colts Neck tape: "Born in the U.S.A.", "Downbound Train", and "Working on the Highway" (reworked from "Child Bride"), while the electric versions of "Pink Cadillac" and "Bye Bye Johnny" <--verify--> were released as the B-sides of the "Dancing in the Dark" and "I'm on Fire" singles, respectively. Out of the fifteen songs on the original demo tape, "Losin' Kind" is the only one that remains unreleased.

Critical reception

Professional ratings

Initial reviews
Review scores
Source	Rating
Record Mirror
Rolling Stone
Smash Hits	6½/10
The Village Voice	A−

"Many critics praised the album's sincerity."

Time described it as “an acoustic bypass through the American heartland ... like a Library of Congress field recording made out behind some shutdown auto plant,”

Joel Selvin, San Francisco Chronicle

• "IN AN ARTISTICALLY daring move virtually unprecedented in the record business, Bruce Springsteen refused to succumb to pressures to follow up the No. 1 success of his last album, The River, with anything that even remotely resembled his breakthrough double-record set of two years ago."
• "It is a stark, raw document, rough edges intact, and so intimately personal it is surprising he would even play the tape for other people at all, let alone put it out as an album."
• "Nebraska is an artist's sketchbook. On this record, Springsteen fouls up time and meter on frequent occasion, mumbles inarticulate lyrics at points, and generally includes stray marks and moments of human fallibility anybody else would have taken the time to record over. Not that Springsteen is lazy, but, rather, the obvious intention of this work is to let the listener in on the creative process at a tender, fragile moment that can never been recaptured."
• "But Nebraska only recalls the early works of Bob Dylan and his folk movement colleagues as far as the instrumental approach. The ten songs are rich Springsteen, full of automobiles, working class heroes, and the dreams and nightmares of everyday people."
• "These are stories as much as they are songs."
• "Never before has a major recording artist made himself so vulnerable or open. Only somebody who is as trusted, known and loved as Springsteen could get away with dashing off a few quick sketches, throwing them in frames and mounting them on the gallery walls."

Record Mirror

• "'THE BOSS' is back with a solo album in the true sense of the term, 10 songs played with a sparse guitar and harmonica backing onto a four-track tape machine."
• "The subjects travel along well furrowed ground juxtaposing the American dream of escape into cars, desperate love and never-ending nights with the American reality of factory working and Catholic repression."
• "Springsteen's gift for making epic aural stories out of such material is turned on its head by the simple backing. Those that think his power comes from the deft arrangement of the E Street Band's rock 'n' roll panache will find it a shock. There can be no doubt that the songs work well without the sometimes overblown bluster of the at times unwieldy outfit."

• "If you already like peering through the windscreen of Springsteen's odyssey through America you'll probably enjoy this journey. If not, why not take a ride?"

Smash Hits

• "A completely unexpected album, recording in his front room on a four-track machine, Nebraska is an all-acoustic effort that focuses on the darker, more introspective side of Springsteen's music. The bleak pessimism of the songs and their rather ponderous delivery is likely to ensure that this one will find favor with fans only"

Billboard

• "downbeat, intensely personal collection"
• "spare acoustic guitar, harmonica, and occasional vocal overdubs leave room for his gripping lyrics to take center stage"
• "radio may balk...but his fans will be moved"

Cash Box

• "an intensely personal, passionate work"
• "Sparse, acoustical musical context"
• "the entire LP's powerful depth demands attention"

Jon Young, Trouser Press

• "Nebraska is a radical change for Bruce Springsteen"
• "He may have scaled down his attack, but Springsteen hasn't diminished his ambition one bit. He's still striving to depict the drama and romance in the lives of ordinary folks."
• "Springsteen now seeks to place himself in the tradition of the guitar-strumming storyteller. He succeeds, too, although his whoops and affected "folksy" diction indicate too clearly the depths of his self-consciousness. On the other hand, it's hard to resist the plaintiveness of a lonesome harmonica imitating a train whistle."
• "One thing has not changed. Springsteen still treats life as a big deal, full of high drama with inner meaning for those intent on finding it. The consequent generalizing and mythologizing undermines his ability to evoke a specific situation.
• "he shows signs of growth"
• "When Springsteen doesn't force Big Truths onto his subject matter he's a more perceptive commentator and ultimately more profound. It's nice to hear he's learning that very difficult lesson."

Steve Pond, Rolling Stone

• "This is the bravest of Springsteen’s six records; it’s also his most startling, direct and chilling. And if it’s a risky move commercially, Nebraska is also a tactical masterstroke, an inspired way out of the high-stakes rock & roll game that requires each new record to be bigger and grander than the last."
• "But Nebraska comes as a shock, a violent, acid-etched portrait of a wounded America that fuels its machinery by consuming its people’s dreams."
• "Nebraska is an acoustic triumph, a basic folk album on which Springsteen has stripped his art down to the core. It’s as harrowing as Darkness on the Edge of Town, but more measured. Every small touch speaks volumes: the delicacy of the acoustic guitars, the blurred sting of the electric guitars, the spare, grim images."
• "If this record is as deep and unsettling as anything Springsteen has recorded, it is also his narrowest and most single-minded work. He is not extending or advancing his own style so much as he is temporarily adopting a style codified by others. But in that decision are multiple strengths: Springsteen’s clear, sharp focus, his insistence on painting small details so clearly and his determination to make a folk album firmly in the tradition."

In Musician, Paul Nelson said the album sounded “demoralizing” and “murderously monotonous ... deprived of spark or hope.”

Greil Marcus said it was "the most complete and probably the most convincing statement of resistance and refusal that Ronald Reagan's U.S.A. has yet elicited from any artist or any politician."

• "The countless details of craft and empathy that underlie this album portray... a world in which honest work has been trivialized and honest goals reduced to a bet on a state lottery; a world where the rich live as a different species, so far above the aspirations of ordinary people as to seem like gods."

Robert Palmer, The New York Times

• "Nebraska is a stark, brooding, and frequently ominous album, shot full of pain and loss. ... "But this is his most personal record, and his most disturbing."
• "It's been a long time since a mainstream rock star made an album that asks such tough questions and refuses to settle for easy answers – let alone an album suggesting that perhaps there are no answers."

Writing in 1984, Robert Hilburn described Nebraska as "one of the most bold uncompromising artistic statements since John Lennon's Plastic Ono Band album in 1970"

Robert Christgau

• "Literary worth is established with the title tune, in which Springsteen's Charlie Starkweather becomes the first mass murderer in the history of socially relevant singer-songwriting to entertain a revealing thought--wants his pretty baby to sit in his lap when he gets the chair. Good thing he didn't turn that one into a rousing rocker, wouldn't you say, though (Hüsker Dü please note) I grant that some hardcore atonality might also produce the appropriate alienation effect. But the music is a problem here--unlike, er, Dylan, or Robert Johnson, or Johnny Shines or Si Kahn or Kevin Coyne, Springsteen isn't imaginative enough vocally or melodically to enrich these bitter tales of late capitalism with nothing but a guitar, a harmonica, and a few brave arrangements. Still, this is a conceptual coup, especially since it's selling. What better way to set right the misleading premise that rock and roll equals liberation?"

In the Village Voice's annual Pazz & Jop critics poll, Nebraska was voted the third best album of 1982, behind Elvis Costello's Imperial Bedroom and Richard and Linda Thompson's Shoot Out the Lights. Rolling Stone included it in their list of the year's top 40 albums, while NME placed it at number 33 in their end-of-year list.

Legacy

Later records by Springsteen

In the decades following its release, Springsteen has released two albums in a similar stripped-down acoustic style of Nebraska: The Ghost of Tom Joad (1995) and Devils & Dust (2005). With Ghost, Springsteen said that he wanted to "pick up where I'd left off with Nebraska, set the stories in the mid-'90s and in the land of my current residence, California." With Devils, Springsteen felt that his acoustic demos were superior to full-band renditions. Both albums contained downbeat themes, but unlike Nebraska, featured a handful of other musicians accompanying Springsteen on many tracks. Many critics agree that the two albums failed to match the power and consistency of Nebraska. Speaking in 2023, Springsteen referred to Nebraska as his definitive album.

Retrospective reviews

Professional ratings

Retrospective reviews
Review scores
Source	Rating
AllMusic
Chicago Tribune
The Encyclopedia of Popular Music
MusicHound Rock	3.5/5
New Musical Express	7/10
Pitchfork	10/10
Q
The Rolling Stone Album Guide
Tom Hull	B+

Nebraska remains one of the most highly regarded albums in his catalogue.

masterpiece

classic

an outlier in his discography

the album non-Springsteen fans enjoy the most

timeless

one that enjoys repeated listens

"for many fans, including singer Steve Earle, it remains the towering masterpiece of the Boss's career." "the imperfections are somehow part of the record's ultimate charm"

Richard Williams wrote in Q magazine that "Nebraska would simply have been a vastly better record with the benefit of the E Street Band and a few months in the studio."

Pitchfork

• "The power of Nebraska’s whole comes from Springsteen’s blend of fiction and memoir—some songs are personal and intimate with details drawn from Springsteen’s own life, others are the stuff of novels and cinema."
• "On paper, this is Springsteen at his most novelistic, trying to get into the heads of murderers and corrupt cops, or diaristic, revisiting detailed scenes from his childhood. ... But the record’s most lasting power comes not from its words or melodies but from its sound. The atmosphere in the room and the grain of Springsteen’s processed voice scramble notions of a fixed time and place. To put on Nebraska and hear its world of echo is to enter a dream. As Bruce Springsteen songs go, these are very good ones, but their true meaning came out in the presentation."
• "The atmospheric processing on Nebraska, the vast majority of which was imparted by the Echoplex during the mixdown stage, is crucial to the album’s meaning. The slapback echo present on some of the songs conjure early rockabilly..., and the heavy dose of reverb has been present in all kinds of music, from Bobby Vinton’s “Blue Velvet” to any number of country hits. But rather than invoking a certain era, genre, or style, the sound of Nebraska brings to mind the radio, the medium through which these techniques were first widely distributed."
• "The right amount of reverb and echo can make a cheap speaker in a car’s dashboard sound lush and dreamy. Nebraska’s homespun production reinforces the notion that recorded music happens across vast amounts of time and space. The guy playing and singing alone in this rented room in 1982 is connected to the person hearing it by invisible forces moving through the air. That separation, underscored by the arrangements, give the album its force."

Sylvie Simmons, Mojo

• "that nakedness and willingness to face the darkness head-on that made Nebraska a touchstone for a whole new wave of young American bands."

Consequence of Sound

• "one of the darkest, most macabre, utterly heart-wrenching albums of all time."
• "Sandwiched between two stadium-sized rock monoliths, The River (1980) and Born in the USA (1984), that’s what we in the business like to call punk as fuck."
• "Nebraska finds Bruce’s rambunctious ragamuffin pals Sloppy Sue, Big Bones Billy, and Bad Scooter a decade down the line, still languishing in the suffocating towns from which they swore they’d escape. It’s about the folks that never glanced up at their rearview mirrors as their hometowns melted into the horizon. These are the ones that stayed behind or, worse yet, got left behind."
• "The line “Hi ho Silver-o, deliver me from nowhere” encapsulates the entire album perfectly. Here is someone who is so dead inside that even God has given up on him. There’s no hope left, so he’s going to sit back and watch the world burn. That, to me, is what Nebraska is all about. It’s also why the album isn’t widely appreciated outside of Springsteen diehards. His storytelling had never been stronger, but these weren’t necessarily tales people were comfortable hearing, let alone playing at family BBQs or karaoke bars."

Ringer

• "Decades after its release, the haunted highways and haunted characters of the Boss’s largely acoustic masterpiece still haunt the American psyche"
• contains more info on Reagan context"

Ian Winwood, The Daily Telegraph

• "the 10-song collection is its author's most complete, not to mention his most compelling, examination of street-level America."
• a timeless record; "none of these characters have aged a single day"; "As economic and political headwinds bring havoc to their streets once more, the cast of Nebraska could just as plausibly be trudging through the sludge of 2022 with the same kind of buckled tenacity as they did four decades earlier."
• "it’s also proved to be his most enduring. Certainly, in the 21st Century, this strange and troubled piece about the cacophony of an American nightmare has become the record of choice for the committed connoisseur. The hard truths behind its cold stare have proved persistent to the point of immovability."

Margotin/Guesdon: "Nebraska played a major part in Springsteen's elevation to the very select ranks of the best singers in American popular music, thanks to the emotion he conveys to his listeners."

Sheeler: "We will see that Springsteen puts himself into the situations taking a dual stance as narrator and character in these songs. This puts a unique spin on the narrative, where the lines are blurred and each scene seems like a homespun conversation with each character as they share about their lives, losses, crimes, sins, and personal struggles. This use of narrative and context makes the collection very effective for its impact."

Bill See, Consequence of Sound

• "one of the most extraordinarily brave records ever released by a major artist"
• "one of the true masterpieces in American music."
• "Nebraska is high art on a par with Guthrie, Steinbeck and O’Connor. It’s a work that endures because it reveals something about ourselves, particularly as Americans, about the loneliness that lives in all of us and a reminder that we share more than we’d like to admit with those we loathe and try to put out of our minds."

AllMusic:

• "Gradually, his songs became darker and more pessimistic, and those on Nebraska marked a new low. They also found him branching out into better developed stories. ... Just as the recordings were unpolished, the songs themselves didn't seem quite finished; sometimes the same line turned up in two songs. But that only served to unify the album. ... Still, Nebraska was one of the most challenging albums ever released by a major star on a major record label."

Louder

• "stark, dark sixth album might just be his best"

"Nebraska had something of a time-release quality. It revealed its strange power over the years, a thing people found in their own way and their own time. It was passed around like a rumor. Artists of different kinds would still be tapping Nebraska's meaning years after its initial release."

Rankings

Nebraska has appeared on multiple best-of lists. In 1989, it was ranked 43rd on Rolling Stone magazine's list of the 100 greatest albums of the 1980s. In 2003, it was ranked number 224 on Rolling Stone's list of the 500 greatest albums of all time, 226 in a 2012 revised list, and 150 in a 2020 reboot of the list. In 2006, Q placed the album at number 13 in its list of "40 Best Albums of the '80s". In 2012, Slant Magazine listed the album at number 57 on its list of "Best Albums of the 1980s". The following year, NME ranked it number 148 in their list of the 500 greatest albums of all time. Two years later, Ultimate Classic Rock included it in a list compiling the 100 best rock albums of the 1980s. In 2018, Pitchfork listed it as the 28th greatest album of the 1980s. In 2024, Paste magazine placed it at number 223 in their list of the 300 greatest albums of all time. The album was also included in the book 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die.

lists

Telegraph: #4: "may be the greatest and is almost certainly the most celebrated low fidelity album ever made. His socio-political vision growing darker with each release, here he gives us Reagan’s America in road songs that are running out of road. There is a haunting quality to Springsteen's vocals and the echoing guitar on these uncluttered songs. They burn with the deep truth of folk music. In 1982, it sounded shocking in its simplicity. Three decades later, it sounds eternal."

NME: #3:

Uproxx: #5:

UCR, #4: "An unexpected treasure that has lost none of its power since its release."

Spin: #6; " ... a cult classic,"

Guardian: #5;

Influence

Impact on home recording

Nebraska represented a breakthrough in home recording. Spin magazine's Al Shipley wrote that at the time of its release, the majority of musical artists, including smaller indie bands, still only released music that was recorded in a studio and home demos were rarely made available to the public. Nebraska has since been credited as one of the first DIY records released by a major artist and subsequently sparking a DIY revolution. In the decades following its release, numerous artists began recording their own music at home. Warren McQuiston wrote in Performer magazine: "The success of Nebraska strictly as a recording project was the "emperor has no clothes" moment. You could make a record at home, a real one that, and if done right could be good enough to be released on Colombia Records."

Nebraska also influenced the indie rock and underground music scenes, paving the way for releases by artists such as Ween, Neutral Milk Hotel, Iron & Wine, and Bon Iver. Matt Berninger, lead singer of the National, said: "It wasn't just the fact that it was a magical record in terms of its scenes and characters. It was the idea that a major rock star could make something just in his bedroom. It exploded so many of my received ideas and told me that, maybe I could be a musician." Nebraska is considered an essential home record, and was named the greatest home recording ever made by Paste magazine in 2012.

Tributes

Numerous artists have paid tribute to Nebraska since its release. Johnny Cash covered "Johnny 99" and "Highway Patrolman" for his 1983 album Johnny 99. A tribute album, Badlands: A Tribute to Bruce Springsteen's Nebraska, was released in 2000. Produced by Jim Sampas, it featured covers of the Nebraska songs recorded in the stripped-down spirit of the original recordings by artists including Cash, Hank Williams III, Los Lobos, Dar Williams, Deana Carter, Ani DiFranco, Son Volt, Ben Harper, Aimee Mann, and Michael Penn. The album also included covers of three other Springsteen tracks from the same period: "I'm on Fire", "Downbound Train", and "Wages of Sin".

Other artists have described the album's impact on their music. Rage Against the Machine guitarist Tom Morello said: "I didn't know there was music like that, the was as impactful and as heavy as Nebraska was. The alienation that I felt was for the first time expressed in music, and then I became a huge superfan." The singers Kelly Clarkson, Justin Vernon, and rock band the Killers cited Nebraska as an influence when making the albums My December (2003), For Emma, Forever Ago (2007), and Pressure Machine (2021), respectively. The singer-songwriters Aoife O'Donovan and Ryan Adams released full track-by-track covers of Nebraska in 2020 and 2022, respectively. O'Donovan performed the album live in its entirety several times throughout 2023. Nebraska was also a favorite of Richard Thompson and Rosanne Cash.

Outside of music, the song "Highway Patrolman" provided the inspiration for the 1991 film The Indian Runner. Written and directed by Sean Penn and starring David Morse and Viggo Mortensen, the film follows the same plot outline as the song, telling the story of a troubled relationship between two brothers, a deputy sheriff and a criminal. In literature, the short stories in the Tennessee Jones book Deliver Me from Nowhere (2005) were inspired by the themes of Nebraska. The book takes its title from a line in "Open All Night" and "State Trooper". Another book, David Burke's Heart of Darkness: Bruce Springsteen's Nebraska (2011), analyzed the album's influence decades after its release.

In media

Deliver Me from Nowhere film

In January 2024, it was announced that a film based on the making of Nebraska was being made with Springsteen involved along with Scott Cooper serving as the director and writer.

On March 26, 2024, it was announced that Scott Stuber, former chairman of Netflix Films, would be teaming with Ellen Goldsmith-Vein and Eric Robinson to produce the movie for A24. The movie will be based on the 2023 book, Deliver Me from Nowhere: The Making of Bruce Springsteen's Nebraska, which was written by Warren Zanes. Springsteen and his manager Jon Landau will also be involved with the making of the film and Jeremy Allen White is being considered to play Springsteen in the movie. On May 8, 2024, it was reported that Jeremy Strong was in talks to play Jon Landau.

PBS special

A television special celebrating Nebraska, titled Bruce Springsteen's Nebraska: A Celebration in Words and Music, aired on PBS on August 31, 2024. The special, hosted by Deliver Me from Nowhere author Warren Zanes, was filmed in Nashville on September 19, 2023, and features numerous musicians singing the album's songs, including Emmylou Harris, Noah Kahan, and Lucinda Williams, interspersed with interviews from Zanes about the album's legacy. Zanes stated in a statement announcing the special: "I wrote a book about Nebraska because the recording stayed with me over decades. Every time there was trouble in my life I reached for Nebraska. When I started doing events around the book's publication, I quickly realized the best of them had music. When I went to Nashville, I had a remarkable cast of musicians to help me tell this story."

Reissues

Nebraska was first released on CD in 1984. This was followed by an LP and CD reissue by Sony BMG in 2007 and 2008, respectively.

In 2015, Sony Music released a remastered version of the album on both LP and CD. In October 2022, Sony Music reissued the album again on black smoke vinyl, featuring an original art print by Justin A. McHugh and a listening notes booklet with new sleeve notes by Springsteen biographer Peter Ames Carlin, to mark its 40th anniversary.

Track listing

All tracks are written by Bruce Springsteen

Side one

No.	Title	Length
1.	"Nebraska"	4:27
2.	"Atlantic City"	3:54
3.	"Mansion on the Hill"	4:03
4.	"Johnny 99"	3:38
5.	"Highway Patrolman"	5:39
6.	"State Trooper"	3:15

Side two

No.	Title	Length
1.	"Used Cars"	3:05
2.	"Open All Night"	2:55
3.	"My Father's House"	5:43
4.	"Reason to Believe"	4:09
Total length:		41:02

Personnel

According to the liner notes and the authors Philippe Margotin and Jean-Michel Guesdon:

• Bruce Springsteen – vocals; guitars; harmonica (1–5, 7, 9–10); mandolin (1–3, 5); glockenspiel (1, 7); synthesizer (9)
• Mike Batlan – recording engineer
• Dennis King – mastering
• Bob Ludwig, Steve Marcussen – mastering consultants
• Andrea Klein – design
• David Michael Kennedy – photography (copyrighted 1975)

Charts

Weekly charts

1982 weekly chart performance for Nebraska

Chart (1982)	Position
Australian Albums (Kent Music Report)	8
Canada Top Albums/CDs (RPM)	3
Dutch Albums (Album Top 100)	7
French Albums (SNEP)	18
Japanese Oricon LPs Chart	10
New Zealand Albums (RMNZ)	3
Norwegian Albums (VG-lista)	3
Swedish Albums (Sverigetopplistan)	2
UK Albums Chart	3
US Billboard Top LPs & Tape	3
West German Media Control Albums (Gfk)	37

2019 weekly chart performance for Nebraska

Chart (2019)	Position
Swiss Albums (Schweizer Hitparade)	73

Year-end charts

Year-end chart performance for Nebraska

Chart (1982)	Position
Canadian Albums (RPM)	32
UK Albums Chart	88

Certifications

Sales certifications for Nebraska

Region	Certification	Certified units/sales
Australia (ARIA)	Platinum	70,000^
Canada (Music Canada)	Gold	50,000^
United Kingdom (BPI)	Gold	100,000^
United States (RIAA)	Platinum	1,000,000^
^ Shipments figures based on certification alone.

References

Sources

• Carlin, Peter Ames (2012). Bruce. New York City: Simon & Schuster. ISBN 978-1-4391-9182-8.
• Dolan, Marc (2012). Bruce Springsteen and the Promise of Rock 'n' Roll. New York City: W. W. Norton & Company. ISBN 978-0-39308-135-0.
• Gaar, Gillian G. (2016). Boss: Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band – The Illustrated History. Minneapolis: Voyageur Press. ISBN 978-0-76034-972-4.
• Graff, Gary (1996). "Bruce Springsteen". In Graff, Gary (ed.). MusicHound Rock: The Essential Album Guide. Detroit: Visible Ink Press. ISBN 978-0-7876-1037-1.
• Heylin, Clinton (2012). E Street Shuffle: The Glory Days of Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band (2013 ed.). London: Constable. ISBN 978-1-78033-868-2.
• Himes, Geoffrey (2005). Bruce Springsteen's Born in the U.S.A. London: Bloomsbury Academic. ISBN 978-0-8264-1661-2. Archived from the original on May 10, 2024. Retrieved May 13, 2024.
• Kent, David (1993). Australian Chart Book 1970–1992 (illustrated ed.). St Ives: Australian Chart Book. ISBN 978-0-646-11917-5.
• Kirkpatrick, Rob (2007). The Words and Music of Bruce Springsteen. Santa Barbara: Greenwood Publishing Group. ISBN 978-0-27598-938-5.
• Larkin, Colin (2011). "Bruce Springsteen". Encyclopedia of Popular Music (5th ed.). London: Omnibus Press. ISBN 978-0-85712-595-8.
• Margotin, Philippe; Guesdon, Jean-Michel (2020). Bruce Springsteen All the Songs: The Story Behind Every Track. London: Cassell Illustrated. ISBN 978-1-78472-649-2. Archived from the original on February 26, 2023. Retrieved April 11, 2024.
• Marsh, Dave (1987). Glory Days: Bruce Springsteen in the 1980s. New York City: Pantheon Books. ISBN 0-394-54668-7.
• Marsh, Dave (2004). Bruce Springsteen: Two Hearts – The Definitive Biography, 1972–2003. Abingdon-on-Thames: Routledge. ISBN 978-0-415-96928-4.
• Springsteen, Bruce (2016). Born to Run. New York City: Simon & Schuster. ISBN 978-1-5011-4151-5.
• Springsteen, Bruce (2003). Songs. London: Virgin Books. ISBN 978-0-7535-0862-6.
• Zanes, Warren (2023). Deliver Me From Nowhere: The Making of Bruce Springsteen's Nebraska. New York City: Crown. ISBN 978-0-59323-741-0. Archived from the original on May 10, 2024. Retrieved April 11, 2024.

External links

• Nebraska at Discogs (list of releases)
• Album lyrics and audio samples