One of the saddest and most touching quotes from the time is where Bruce reveals the fact that there is almost nothing in his life apart from his music. While building his devoted audience, Springsteen had cemented their loyalty by twining rock star privilege with mensch largesse.

Nebraska can sound like a bad-seed cousin to the Darkness character who sings “Factory” or “Racing in the Street. Whether you see Springsteen in them or not, whether the amps and guitars are in the room or not, you look at them knowing who was there once and what got done at the time, Darkness on the Edge of Town and much of The River.Only a supreme conceptual optimist could turn a song about depression into a glitter ball-friendly hit single. The natural follow-up to Springsteen’s hugely successful album The River should have been the hit-packed Born in the U.

captures the dark essence of the American dream, shedding light on a hidden world we’d rather not face but live in all the same, and does so in a way that will forever stand the test of time.Instead, in 1982, he came out with an album consisting of a series of dark songs he had recorded by himself, for himself.

Apparently even Bob Dylan had made his own attempt to see one of Springsteen’s creative spaces, empty and well after the fact. Zanes, a New Hampshire native and the guitarist for the 1980s Boston band the Del Fuegos before entering academia — he holds a Ph. 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. uk/culture/books/bookreviews/8994760/Heart-Of-Darkness-Bruce-Springsteens-Nebraska-by-David-Burke-review.I’ve been there myself, in a recording studio, watching as an engineer sees my vocal going past, a little out of tune. It’s very interesting to see the self doubt Bruce had and the many ways these songs may have been ruined if they kept with the plan to record them with the E Street band. edu/scholarlyworks/238/ "Professor Levine examines Springsteen's portrayal of the "criminal as brother" in the track "Highway Patrolman.

I’m not suggesting a kind of abstinence — an out-and-out refusal of the fix — but I am arguing for a more conscious balance.He described it to me as “an accident start to finish” but also as the album that “still might be [his] best. But more than forty years later, Nebraska is arguably Springsteen’s most important record—the lasting clue to understanding not just his career as an artist and the vision behind it, but also the man himself. Last November he turned up unannounced at a Winnipeg house where the Canadian rock star Neil Young grew up. In this intimate retelling of how Bruce Springsteen’s most introspective album came to be, musician Zanes ( Petty) unpacks the psyche, pathos, and music industry machinery that made it so surprising and stirring. Zanes goes into a lot of detail in this book, not just covering the writing and recording of “Nebraska” but also going into a little of the background of where Springsteen was at in his career at that time and, particularly, the lengthy, sometimes fraught, recording sessions that went on to create his previous albums, particularly “Darkness on the Edge of Town” and “The River”.