Bruce Springsteen’s Most Haunting Album Was Recorded in His Bedroom
Audrey Connelly is a writer living and working in Boston, MA. Music is and has always been one of the most important parts of her life. While rock & roll is her true love, Audrey's taste runs the gamut. Deep cuts, overplayed Billboard Hot 100 hits, trip hop, reggae, musical theater. It's all fair game. However, if she's being totally honest, she is not a huge fan of (most) country music, but she is (mostly) willing to give anything a listen or two.
She has previously contributed to Atwood Magazine and has brought her passion for writing and music – specifically classic and alternative rock – to Collider.
Throughout Bruce Springsteen's prolific career, he has displayed an impressive level of versatility. He is able to oscillate between rock, folk, and pop while still maintaining a through line of authenticity, a loyalty to his unique sound that has captured hearts and ears for decades (and counting.) His music is reflective of the American middle class, of blue-collar workers and salt-of-the-earth neighbors. Imbued with nostalgia and emotion — and widely relatable — it is no surprise Springsteen is considered one of the greatest musicians in the world. While he has many albums that stand out, there is one that differs greatly from the rest of his catalog.
Springsteen’s sixth studio album, Nebraska, is a beautifully evocative collection of solo acoustic recordings. The songs on this album stem from a time of rural isolation where Springsteen immersed himself in American literature, history, film and music – and the resulting album is nothing short of magic. Coming off the 1980 release of The River, which was his most commercially successful album at that time, Springsteen felt the need to retreat from the public eye. He was grappling with fame, fortune, and becoming part of the upper echelon of society. This was a difficult transition for him, as he was so deeply entrenched in his working-class community. He struggled with the idea of getting rich off of music written about the experiences of his friends and neighbors (and himself) who struggled to make ends meet. How could he be the working man's hero from up in the penthouse?
Springsteen Was Deeply Inspired by Southern Gothic Literature
In 1981, he rented a ranch in Colts Neck, New Jersey and retreated there alone. He did not squander his time in isolation. He turned to American classics to find inspiration and answers. During this time, Springsteen read voraciously. He was specifically inspired by the Southern Gothic short stories of Flannery O’Connor. Springsteen resonated with O’Connor’s ability to pull something meaningful from the banality of American life, to cut to the core of humanity against a backdrop of dilapidated houses and chicken coops. Her portrayal of ordinary people and the darkness that often exists within them, the bitterness against a world that has not been kind to them, inspired Springsteen to write about his own childhood and family.
Springsteen said in a 1998 interview: “It was always at the core of every one of her stories—the way that she’d 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.” He was inspired by the specificity of O’Connor’s prose, but also her ability to explain a feeling without naming it. His previous work began to feel too vague, too obtuse. Springsteen worked to elevate his writing and elicit emotion through detailed descriptions, the creation of characters, and artful omissions. He also strove to capture the stark desolation that he felt in his childhood and recognized in O'Connor's writing – what he described as her ability to portray “meanness that she never spelled out.”
Character Creation and World Building in Nebraska
Many of the songs on the record are written from the varying perspectives of Springsteen’s invented characters, inspired by his lived experience and the literature that he read during his time in Coles Neck. “Highway Patrolman,” the fifth track on Nebraska, is written from the perspective of – you guessed it – a highway patrolman named Joe Roberts. The song tells the story of Joe, a solid all-American guy trying to do right, and his brother Frank, who “ain’t no good.” Joe struggles to maintain his fraught relationship with his brother, trying to uphold the law but not wanting to get Frank in trouble. Eventually, Frank ends up seriously hurting a boy in a bar fight, leading to a car chase up to the Canadian border. The song is a self-contained vignette, deftly capturing the American Heartland and relatable family strife.
He watched films such as The Grapes of Wrath and Badlands, both depicting the stark and seemingly endless landscape of the Midwest, and the darkness that makes its home there. He listened to music that captured this same feeling of expansive desolation – Woody Guthrie, Hank Williams, and Bob Dylan, among others. Springsteen fully immersed himself in this bleak, barren headspace that reflected the topography of Middle America.
“Nebraska”, the titular track on the album, was inspired by the movie Badlands and the true story behind the film – the journey of spree killer Charles Starkweather and his young girlfriend through Nebraska and Wyoming, during which they murdered ten people at random. The song is written from the perspective of the killer as if he were recounting his story after being sentenced to death, reflecting on the “fun” he had with his girlfriend, as well as his impending demise. The final lyrics maintain the overall feeling of desolation and meaninglessness: “They want to know why I did what I did/ Sir, I guess there’s just a meanness in this world” (which is the exact term he used to describe the prose of Flannery O'Connor.)
Springsteen Creates an Entire Album (and More) From His Bedroom
While working on this collection of songs, Springsteen asked his guitar technician to bring him a tape recorder. He delivered a four-track cassette recorder, a new piece of technology at the time, and Springsteen got to work creating demos. Initially, he intended to flesh out these bare-bones recordings with the E Street Band. He wrote, recorded, and mixed dozens of songs in his Coles Neck bedroom, ten of which would appear on Nebraska. His next album, 1984's Born in the U.S.A., also contains many of the songs he wrote during this period of isolation.
The lo-fi recording of these songs creates an ambiance of ghostly discontentment, within which the listener becomes fully immersed. The music often sounds as if it is coming from far, far away – or, conversely, alarmingly close, as if Bruce Springsteen himself is whispering in your ear. The tracks are full of beautiful imperfections that crackle and echo, painting a haunting image of the American Heartland. The sound quality reflects the contents of Springsteen’s lyrics: stark, desolate, contemplative, and disillusioned. While some of these songs would later be re-recorded with the band, he decided to release the songs in their original demo form, creating his eerie and unforgettably cinematic 1982 album: Nebraska.
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