Deliver Me from Nowhere: The Making of Bruce Springsteen's Nebraska

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The result is a textured and revelatory account of not only a crucial moment in the career of an icon but also a record that upended all expectations and predicted a home-recording revolution. It is probably difficult for many Springsteen fans like me to engage with this person properly without it degenerating into unthinking and stupid hero worship. Nebraska expressed a turmoil that was reflective of the mood of the country, but it was also a symptom of trouble in the artist’s life, the beginnings of a mental breakdown that Springsteen would only talk about openly decades after the album’s release. In one exchange, Zanes gamely compares the conjoined Nebraska/Born In The USA diptych to the heroic trials of Homer’s Odyssey, with Springsteen hilariously deadpan in response: “Go on”… “Incredible”.

Released in 1982, two years after Springsteen’s first chart-topper The River, Nebraska is the album no-one wanted Bruce to make: stripped-back demos that never made it to the E Street band rehearsal room form the album’s ten tracks. We had listened to Darkness on the Edge of Town, his newest album, intently for a couple of weeks, and had read future biographer Dave Marsh’s rave review in Rolling Stone. He described it to me as “an accident start to finish” but also as the album that “still might be [his] best. Years later,” Zanes adds, “it would seem Nebraska was the pulling back of the bow, and Born in the U. You get an insight into Springsteen (and his relationship with Landau) that Bruce's autobiography misses.I’m part of the problem of recorded music revealing less and less about the beauty and the emotional possibility surrounding imperfection. There was no tour, no interviews, no explanation why America’s ascendant rock’n’roll star was following up his first Number 1, The River, with a bleak album about murder and isolation. He also emphasises the importance of its accidental genesis, the fact that Springsteen pressed ‘record’ on his new TEAC 144 4-track with no intention that these demos would be his next album, rather than sketches for what became Born In The USA. I wouldn’t say that this would be a book for the casual fan, if you’re someone who knows “the hits” but not much else then this probably isn’t for you but for the people who know and love “Nebraska” already they will definitely get a lot out of this. Luther Vandross, a key figure in Twenty Feet from Stardom, was at those same Bowie sessions, singing and arranging backups on Bowie’s “Young Americans.

Fewer are the opportunities to hear oneself in the music, to follow the threads that tie the listener to it. My brother and I bought a copy of this for our Dad for his birthday and, as with most things Springsteen related, I couldn’t get him one without getting myself one!

What Warren Zanes’ book does so well is to put this album into the context described above and to make sense of it within the wider story of American society. Zanes takes us with him into Springsteen’s New Jersey home, just a few miles from the house where Nebraska was made and not much further from his childhood home in Freehold, host to the trauma that seeded Nebraska’s desperate core.

But I always remembered that Springsteen passed on the first of those questions, which surprised me. As an unexpected transition from "The River" to "Born in the USA", Warren Zanes explores what drove Bruce Springsteen to make an album that "he didn't know he was making" at the time, and the technical struggles to get his homemade cassette converted to a releasable album. I would have liked a little more detail on exactly how all the songs were individually written and recorded. Zanes interweaves these conversations with inquiries into the myriad cultural touchpoints, including Terrence Malick's Badlands and the short stories of Flannery O'Conner, that influenced Springsteen as he was writing the album's haunting songs. KEEP READING: ‘ U2’s Songs of Surrender is a four-disc collection of “reimagined” versions of 40 songs from the band’s discography.Access to Bruce, his manager, ands lots of great stories make for a very interesting and highly recommended read.