User:Zmbro/Nebraska (album)

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

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. The album's reverb-laden vocals and mood combined with dark lyrical content have been described by music critic William Ruhlmann as "one of the most challenging albums ever released by a major star on a major record label".

Background
Bruce Springsteen rented a ranch in Colts Neck, New Jersey, following the conclusion of the River Tour in September 1981.


 * "During this period, Springsteen tasked his guitar tech, Mike Batlan, with buying a simple tape recorder so that he could tinker with some new songs and arrangements without having to bother with renting studio time. Batlan picked up a Teac Tascam 144 Portastudio, a then-new device that was the first piece of equipment to use a standard cassette tape for multi-track recording."

from BitUSA article

Springsteen intended to rerecord the Colts Neck demos with the E Street Band – pianist Roy Bittan, saxophonist Clarence Clemons, organist Danny Federici, bassist Garry Tallent, guitarist Steven Van Zandt, and drummer Max Weinberg – during sessions booked to begin in April 1982 at the Power Station in New York City, where The River (1980) had been recorded.

In April, Springsteen and the E Street Band regrouped at the Power Station to record the demos as full-band versions for release on the next album.

The band spent two weeks attempting full-band arrangements of the Colts Neck tracks, including "Nebraska", "Johnny 99", and "Mansion on the Hill", but Springsteen and his co-producers were dissatisfied with the recordings. Plotkin described the performances with E Street as "less meaningful... less compelling... less honest" than the demo recordings. Other songs from the tape, including "Born in the U.S.A.", "Downbound Train", and "Child Bride" (now rewritten as "Working on the Highway"), proved successful in full-band arrangements.

"Springsteen carried around the cassette in his pocket as he tried to figure out what to do with his new collection of songs."

Despite the band's productivity and excitement about the recorded material, Springsteen remained focused on the rest of the Colts Neck songs. Realizing the tracks would not work in full-band arrangements, he decided to release the demos as is. 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".

new


 * "re-recording the songs sacrificed something vital, stripping them of their dusty, dream-like quality, and so those efforts ultimately came to naught."

Quote: "A lot of its content was in its style, in the treatment of it,” he said in an interview in 1984. “It needed that really kinda austere, echoey sound, just one guitar—one guy telling his story."

Mixing and mastering
"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, But with the help of newer mastering technologies, the finished product found the right balance of raw legitimacy and sonic competency"

Another problem arose during mastering of the tapes because of low recording volume, but that was resolved with sophisticated noise reduction techniques.

old garbage

Initially, Springsteen recorded demos for the album at his home with a 4-track cassette recorder. The demos were sparse, using only acoustic guitar, electric guitar (on "Open All Night"), harmonica, mandolin, glockenspiel, tambourine, organ, synthesizer (on "My Father's House") and Springsteen's voice. After he completed work on the demos, Springsteen brought the songs to the studio and worked with the E Street Band in April 1982 on rock versions; these sessions are commonly referred to as "the Electric Nebraska Sessions". Only Springsteen and Jon Landau had any decision-making power in this process. They felt certain songs were too personal, and the raw, haunting folk essence present on the home tapes could not be duplicated or equaled in the band treatments; the tracks about which they felt this way made up the album Nebraska. However, eight of the 12 tracks that went on the 1984 album Born in the U.S.A. were composed of "Electric Nebraska" success stories. They were led by "Born in the U.S.A.", which was completed on May 3, 1982; "Downbound Train", recorded April 28, 1982; "Cover Me", recorded at The Hit Factory, New York on January 25, 1982; "I'm On Fire", recorded at The Power Station on May 11, 1982; "Glory Days", recorded at The Power Station on May 5, 1982; "Darlington County", recorded at The Power Station on May 13, 1982; "Working on the Highway", recorded April 30 and May 6, 1982, and "I'm Going Down", recorded on May 12 or 13, 1982.

The demo recording sessions that produced the album actually covered several days, but January 3, 1982, is credited as the "legendary night" when 15 tracks were recorded. They were "Starkweather" ("Nebraska"), "Atlantic City", "Mansion on the Hill", "Johnny 99", "Highway Patrolman", "State Trooper", "Used Cars", "Wanda" ("Open All Night"), "Reason to Believe", "Born in the U.S.A.", "Downbound Train", "Child Bride", "Losin' Kind", "My Father's House" (May 25, 1982), and "Pink Cadillac", a total of 15 songs; 10 ended up on Nebraska and the demo for "Born in the U.S.A." would appear later on the Tracks compilation. The remaining four unreleased demos circulate among Springsteen fans. Two of these, "Downbound Train" (Born in the U.S.A.) and "Pink Cadillac" (Tracks), were officially released in band format, leaving "Child Bride" and "Losin' Kind" as truly unreleased. There was another demo, "The Big Payback" recorded later in spring 1982, and "Johnny Bye-Bye", which Springsteen confused with a live version recorded July 1981, that was actually never recorded during this period, that brings the total to the often-cited 17.

possibly

In an interview with Rolling Stone, Springsteen said, "I was just doing songs for the next rock album, and I decided that what always took me so long in the studio was the writing. I would get in there, and I just wouldn't have the material written, or it wasn't written well enough, and so I'd record for a month, get a couple of things, go home write some more, record for another month—it wasn't very efficient."

Springsteen fans have long speculated whether the full-band recordings of the Nebraska session tracks, nicknamed Electric Nebraska, that took place in the last week of April 1982, will ever surface. Of the theoretical 17 tracks, 5 were not recorded with the band ("Losin' Kind", "Child Bride", "The Big Payback", "State Trooper" and "My Father's House"), and "Born in the U.S.A.", "Downbound Train" and "Pink Cadillac" have been released, leaving nine in the vaults. In a 2006 interview, manager Jon Landau said that the release of the remaining tracks is unlikely, and that "the right version of Nebraska came out".

In a 2010 interview with Rolling Stone, E Street Band drummer Max Weinberg praised the full band renditions of the album as "killing" and "very hard-edged".

"Steve Van Zandt said that when Springsteen played him the home-made demos of Nebraska he told his old friend to release the album in its original state, 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."

Music and lyrics
Genres: Folk folk rock heartland rock lo-fi

Several songs on The River foreshadowed the direction Springsteen took for Nebraska, including "Stolen Car", "The River", and "Wreck On the Highway". " Springsteen described "Stolen Car" as: "The predecessor for a good deal of the music I'd be writing in the future... inner-directed, psychological."


 * "folk ballads and story songs, set to melodies that are effectively evocative precisely because they sound so traditional."

"folk, country, and early rock influences"

Pitchfork
 * "Early in his career, Springsteen’s work thrived on personal instinct, but in isolation, it became more reliant on specific inputs. He’d transform ideas he discovered in books and films and the news into frameworks for songs: the short stories of Flannery O’Connor, which detailed the harsh lives of people living on the margins; Ron Kovick’s Born on the Fourth of July, in which a gung-ho soldier becomes deeply scarred by the actions of his government. At some point, he saw Terrence Malick’s Badlands on television, a film based on the 1957–58 killing spree of Charlie Starkweather. The Starkweather murders were meaningless, and the randomness of that violence and inability to explain it fit with the mood of Springsteen’s songwriting."
 * "“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
 * "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."


 * "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."

CRR
 * "Some of the songs were inspired by 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"
 * "Nebraska got its title from a 1950s killing spree in and around Lincoln, Nebraska, by 19-year-old Charles Starkweather and his 14-year-old girlfriend, Caril Ann Fugate."

Side one
"Nebraska"
 * follows mass murderer Charles Starkweather "who murdered 10 people on a cross-country spree and explained himself when he was caught by saying, I guess there's just a meanness in this world." ; "gentle" and "soothing" music
 * inspired by viewing of Terrence Mallick's Badlands (1973)

"Atlantic City"
 * mob wars in the titular city
 * "a story of an out-of-luck character who is about to perform an unnamed act that he hopes will rescue his life from oblivion."
 * "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. Springsteen incorporated some real-life figures into this fictional song, the “chicken man” was mafia boss Philip Testa, who was killed by a bomb planted at his Philadelphia house in March 1981."

"Mansion on the Hill"
 * "Nebraska is arguably Bruce Springsteen's greatest album, and one of its strongest songs is "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."

"Johnny 99"
 * "a young man laid off from the Mahwah, N.J., Ford plant who takes out his frustration on a hapless hotel clerk -with a gun."
 * "describes an act of murder that is the product of blinding desperation"
 * "finds a laid-off autoworker begging for the death penalty after his arrest for shooting a night clerk."
 * ""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. The outlaw theme of the song immediately appealed to Johnny Cash, who covered "Johnny 99" and even used it as the title song of his next album, Johnny 99, released in 1983. Springsteen performed the song during his Born in the U.S.A. tour in 1984-1985, and included a concert version on his Live 1975-1985 box set in 1986. The Cash version was featured on Rhino Records' 1986 compilation of Springsteen-written songs, Cover Me. In 1997, John Hiatt performed it on another Springsteen covers album, One Step Up/Two Steps Back, reissued in 2000 as The Songs of Bruce Springsteen. And also in 2000, Los Lobos cut "Johnny 99" for Badlands: A Tribute to Bruce Springsteen's Nebraska."

"Highway Patrolman"
 * "an indelible tale of the ties that bind and the toll familial love exacts"
 * Joe Roberts "is a decent sort, but he 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. A live favorite with many of his fans, the song has been successfully recorded by Johnny Cash, who gives the lyrics arguably even more depth and resonance."
 * "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 is perhaps Bruce Springsteen's closest album to being flawless, but it does contain some weaker moments. "State Trooper" is one of these, although even this track is not without its merits. Springsteen was a big fan of the Suicide song "Frankie Teardrop" at the time, and "State Trooper" is clearly a song in that vein, with its pumping, monotonous bass line drone and howling, distorted vocals. The song continues the theme of many of the songs on the album, with lyrics about an outlaw on the run, chanting "Mr. State Trooper/Please don't stop me/Please don't stop me." However, unlike most of the album, the song is essentially one-dimensional. Although it is a powerful, chilling performance, it certainly doesn't live up to the standard set by "Highway Patrolman" or "My Father's House." Interestingly, many performers, perhaps attracted to the primal quality of the song, have chosen to record it, with Steve Earle and the Cowboy Junkies recording successful versions of it, although not veering too much from Springsteen's original."
 * "a song directly influenced by “Frankie Teardrop” by the synth-punk band Suicide, is 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."

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.”"

"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 one of the jewels of Nebraska, 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."

"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.”"

"Reason to Believe"
 * "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."
 * "Having written songs with titles like "Fire" and "Dancing in the Dark," Bruce Springsteen has never been bothered much about appropriating someone else's title, no matter how famous the earlier song may have been. (Titles cannot be copyrighted.) Another good example of this is "Reason to Believe." "Not the Tim Hardin song but a completely original tune by the same name," he warns in the notes he sent to his manager along with the demo tapes that became his 1982 album Nebraska. The Tim Hardin song, first recorded by Hardin on a self-titled album in 1966, is perhaps best known as the closing number on Rod Stewart's celebrated 1971 album Every Picture Tells a Story, though it has been covered numerous times. Springsteen's song is not nearly as well known, and that's no surprise. Unlike the 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."

Artwork
"Burke explains how the sleeve cover of Nebraska evolved. The photograph is a two-lane blacktop in the Midwest, taken by David Michael Kennedy through the windshield of a car some time in the 1970s. The bleak picture fitted the name and the mood of an album for which the title Open All Night had been considered and rejected. "Nebraska is built on the premise that everybody knows what it's like to be condemned," said Springsteen."

Release
Date: September 30, 1982

Debuted on the U.S. Billboard Top LPs & Tape chart at number 29, peaking at number three eventually sold one million copies (platinum)

A commercial success elsewhere: peaked at number two in Sweden, three in Canada, Norway, New Zealand, and the U.K., number seven in the Netherlands, eight in Australia, and ten in Japan. It also reached number 18 in France and 37 in West Germany.

Springsteen himself did not promote the album; he conducted no interviews and, for the first time after an album release, did not tour, his only such release until 2019's Western Stars.

Bill See: "It cannot be overstated just how jarring a release Nebraska was in 1982. The charts were being ruled by such vapid banalities as Olivia Newton-John’s “Physical”, Human League’s “Don’t You Want Me” and Survivor’s “Eye of the Tiger”. Then along comes a quiet folk record made on an old 4-track, basically just voice and guitar about killers, small-time thieves and other forgotten souls. It took some major stones to release it."

Singles:
 * "Atlantic City" – October 8, 1982 (Europe and Japan only); "Mansion on the Hill" as the B-side
 * A music video was produced; it features stark, black-and-white images of the city, which had not yet undergone its later economic transformation.


 * "Open All Night" – November 22, 1982 (Europe only); B-side "The Big Payback"

Initial
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 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."
 * "'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
 * "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
 * spotlight
 * "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."

Robert Palmer, The New York Times
 * "Using only his own guitar and harmonica, occasional and strictly functional synthesizer backdrops, and a Teac cassette recorder, Mr. Springsteen has fashioned an austere, compelling and cost-efficient state-of-the-union message."
 * "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. NME placed it at number 33 in their end-of-year list.

Retrospective
"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 most singular album in his catalog."
 * "remains an outlier for Springsteen, a record that sits uneasily in his discography. Instead of making an impact upon release, Nebraska has been accruing weight gradually over the last four decades, becoming a marker of its socioeconomic era as well as an early document of the later home-recording revolution. It stands alone partly because Springsteen didn’t tour behind it—his work is ultimately about his connection to his audience, and that connection is felt most intensely when he’s performing onstage—and partly because the record itself is kind of an accident, something that fell into place before Springsteen knew what to do with it."
 * "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. One writer even turned the songs’ narratives into a book of short stories. 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 (the technique, which thickens sound by folding a slight delay onto the signal, was pioneered by Sam Phillips at Sun Studio and can be heard in all its glory on the sides Elvis Presley recorded there), 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."
 * "In the arc of Springsteen’s career, Nebraska is still a blip. It’s an essential record in the history of home recording, but it was sort of a cul-de-sac for Springsteen himself. He has returned twice to the general format of the record, releasing the mostly solo and mostly acoustic albums The Ghost of Tom Joad (1995) and Devils & Dust (2005), but neither comes close to the alchemy of Nebraska. This one just happened. Springsteen covers the entire episode of the record in just a few pages in Born to Run, and there isn’t a lot to say. He wrote the songs, he put them down on a demo, and that demo became the record. It didn’t sell particularly well and got no airplay. “Life went on,” is how he ends the section of his book on the record. And so it does."

UCR

Consequence of Sound

punknews.org?

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 Winwod, Telegraph

Bill See, Consequence of Sound
 * "one of the most extraordinarily brave records ever released by a major artist"
 * "Its Nebraska’s imperfections (the creaking of a chair, the “P’s” that pop, the over-modulated harmonicas and Jimmy Rogers-like howls that pin the VU meters), that create what Burke calls Nebraska’s “spooky underworld”. These quirks send anal retentive purveyors of production perfection screaming into the night, but credit Springsteen for sticking to his artistic convictions and recognizing what Neil Young did when he released the harrowing and gloriously flawed Tonight’s the Night."
 * "Nebraska is a kind of magic in the bottle that’s only captured through sheer happenstance. It’s no coincidence that Bruce walked around for weeks with the cassette in his back pocket, unaware it would not only become his next record but be talked about, and rightfully so, as one of the true masterpieces in American music."
 * "Nebraska is the penultimate and original DIY record. It’s punk rock without the manufactured angst, safety pins and Magic Marker drawn anarchy symbols. The work of a truly independent artist, in the purest sense of the word, steadfast, this album is resolute and armed with the courage of his convictions as Springsteen’s sole motivation."
 * "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."
 * "Paste Magazine recently named Nebraska the greatest homemade record ever, and its influence was momentous. I can tell you it made me go out and buy a 4-track machine and start recording home demos. Countless others did, too. I’d go so far as to suggest if Black Flag and the Minutemen’s pioneering treks by van across the country was the DIY touring template for a generation of indie rockers, then Nebraska was the blueprint for the record you could make on the cheap and tour behind — a principle that has come to full fruition now not just for the underground, but major artists as well."

AllMusic:
 * "There is an adage in the record business that a recording artist's demos of new songs often come off better than the more polished versions later worked up in a studio. But Bruce Springsteen was the first person to act on that theory, when he opted to release the demo versions of his latest songs, recorded with only acoustic or electric guitar, harmonica, and vocals, as his sixth album, Nebraska. It was really the content that dictated the approach, however. Nebraska's ten songs marked a departure for Springsteen, even as they took him farther down a road he'd already been traveling. 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. The title track was a first-person account of the killing spree of mass murderer Charlie Starkweather. (It can't have been coincidental that the same story was told in director Terrence Malick's 1973 film Badlands, also used as a Springsteen song title.) That song set the tone for a series of portraits of small-time criminals, desperate people, and those who loved them. 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. Within the difficult times, however, there was hope, especially as the album went on. "Open All Night" was a Chuck Berry-style rocker, and the album closed with "Reason to Believe," a song whose hard-luck verses were belied by the chorus -- even if the singer couldn't understand what it was, "people find some reason to believe." 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"
 * masterpiece

Rankings
In 1989, Nebraska 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, and 226 in a 2012 revised list, and 150 in a 2020 reboot of the list. Pitchfork listed it as the 60th greatest album of the 1980s. 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 album was also included in the book 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die.

lists

Telegraph: #4: "A sparse, unforgiving masterpiece recorded solo on a fuzzy four-track cassette machine, this may be the greatest and is almost certainly the most celebrated low fidelity album ever made. Working on a follow-up to epic double set The River, Springsteen was unsatisfied with the full-blooded band arrangements of his songs of loss and desolation, and boldly decided to release the minimalist demos instead. 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: "There are many ways to measure a songwriter’s greatness. Some excel in inventive chord progressions; others seem to pull melodies straight out of the wind. Very few write songs vivid enough to generate feature-length movies. ... ‘Nebraska’s ‘Highway Patrolman’, however, supplied the basis for The Indian Runner, Sean Penn’s 1991 drama, in fewer than six minutes. It’s only one of the songs here that, with nothing but acoustic guitar and human voice, achieves cinematic scope and pathos. Springsteen’s songs have always been distinguished by their eccentric and clearly drawn characters, and ‘Nebraska’ marks his finest work in that department. These monologues –from the gambler in ‘Atlantic City’ to the defendant in ‘Johnny 99’ and the fugitive in ‘State Trooper’ – throw us smack-banger in the middle of the speakers’ lives at their most desperate moments. ‘Nebraska’ finds Bruce Springsteen as director, doing with his pen what others can only do with a camera."

Uproxx: #5: "Like most Springsteen fans — or most people who have good taste — I love Nebraska. But I also resent it a little, and here’s why: It’s the Springsteen record that people who don’t like other Springsteen albums tend to like. When a person says that Nebraska is their favorite Bruce LP, it’s like saying that Punch-Drunk Love is your favorite Adam Sandler movie. Now, Punch-Drunk Love is probably my favorite Adam Sandler movie, but I recognize that singling out the film that’s the least like every other Adam Sandler movie is a back-handed compliment. It feels like a diss against all the attributes that put the guy on the map. It’s a thinly veiled attempt to praise Paul Thomas Anderson at the expense of Rob Schneider."
 * "The same is true of Nebraska — it’s brilliant, but it’s the one without saxophone, the one without Bruce’s stadium-ready rasp, the one without big guitars and bigger drums, the one without all of the things that define a typical Springsteen record."
 * "All of that aside: This unquestionably is the one Springsteen album where the recorded versions of the songs are better than any live performance. And that has everything to do with the eccentric manner in which it was made. It’s not just that Bruce recorded at home. He also worked on haphazard equipment set up in a recklessly unprofessional manner. The most comic aspect of Nebraska occurred during the mix. He ended up using a Panasonic beatbox that had been damaged after falling off a fishing boat. It had originally died after the accidental drowning, but for some cosmic reason, it suddenly came back to life a few weeks later. And, no matter the resources at the millionaire rock star’s disposal, this was deemed appropriate for the making of the sixth Bruce Springsteen studio LP."
 * "Given these circumstances, I would argue that Nebraska is not a folk album. Bruce didn’t banish technology to replicate an authentic musical ideal from an ancient time. Nebraska isn’t free of modernity; it’s abusive towards modernity. Like a Suicide record, Nebraska turns technology against itself. And that’s what makes it a post-punk album. (This is also apparent from the iconic album cover, which makes Nebraska look like a Bauhaus record.)"

UCR, #4: "Nebraska started life as the next E Street Band album when Bruce Springsteen decided to release his stark acoustic demos as his next LP. Wrapped around the theme of darkness and sin that hides in everyone, Nebraska was most pronounced in its exploration of serial killers, family ghosts and the secrets that are never completely hidden from view. An unexpected treasure that has lost none of its power since its release."

Spin: #6; "In 1982, even the smallest independent bands usually went into a professional studio to cut a record. And while rock stars were increasingly investing in lavish home studios, or using simple four-track and eight-track mixers to make demos at home, the intimacy of DIY home recordings was still rarely shared with the public. But while plotting out the ambitious full-band Born in the U.S.A., Springsteen holed up in Colts Neck, New Jersey with a four-track to cut some demos — and he decided to leave 10 of them untouched as a stark acoustic album. “Atlantic City” affirms that the Boss’ ear for hooks can thrive even in this environment. But the otherwise desolate mood of Nebraska, punctured only by his desperate screams on “State Trooper,” have made it a cult classic, the album that even some of Springsteen’s staunchest detractors have grown to love."

Guardian: #5; "A set of demos released because the E Street Band couldn’t record them to Springsteen’s satisfaction, 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. On State Trooper, too, you heard the first evidence he had been listening closely to Suicide."

Legacy
Speaking in 2023, Springsteen himself referred to Nebraska as his definitive album

Covers
Being a highly influential album, the songs of Nebraska have been covered numerous times. Notably, country music icon Johnny Cash's 1983 album Johnny 99 featured versions of two of Springsteen's songs from Nebraska: "Johnny 99" and "Highway Patrolman". Cash also contributed to a widely praised tribute album, Badlands: A Tribute to Bruce Springsteen's Nebraska, which was released on the Sub Pop label in 2000 and produced by Jim Sampas. It featured covers of the Nebraska songs recorded in the stripped-down spirit of the original recordings by a wide-ranging group of artists including Hank Williams III, Los Lobos, Dar Williams, Deana Carter, Ani DiFranco, Son Volt, Ben Harper, Aimee Mann, and Michael Penn. Three additional tracks covered other Springsteen songs in the same vein: Johnny Cash's contribution was "I'm on Fire", a track from Springsteen's best-selling album Born in the U.S.A..

Austin Chronicle

Kelly Clarkson compared her effort to move away from mainstream to edgier and more personal music on her third studio album My December to Springsteen's Nebraska.

On December 7, 2022, singer-songwriter Ryan Adams released a full track-by-track cover of the album.

The Indian Runner
The song "Highway Patrolman" would provide the inspiration for the motion picture The Indian Runner released in 1991. The film follows the same plot outline as the song, telling the story of a troubled relationship between two brothers; one is a deputy sheriff, the other is a criminal. The Indian Runner was written and directed by Sean Penn, and starred David Morse and Viggo Mortensen.

Deliver Me from Nowhere
The short stories in Deliver Me from Nowhere, a book written by Tennessee Jones published in 2005, were inspired by the themes of Nebraska. The book takes its title from a line in "Open All Night" (the line is also the last in "State Trooper").

Pressure Machine
The Killers frequently cited Nebraska as an influence for their 2021 album Pressure Machine. Brandon Flowers in an interview would describe recording the track "Terrible Thing" on a Tascam microphone as a direct nod to the album's recording process.

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.

Personnel

 * Bruce Springsteen – vocals, guitar, harmonica, mandolin, glockenspiel, tambourine, Hammond organ, synthesizer, production
 * Mike Batlan – recording engineer
 * David Michael Kennedy – photography copyrighted 1975
 * Dennis King – mastering
 * Bob Ludwig, Steve Marcussen – mastering consultants
 * Andrea Klein – design