Bruce Springsteen is an artist who clearly values capturing the ideal moment for a song, even if it takes him months or years to find it, and in a roundabout way 1982's
Nebraska is his greatest example of this philosophy. He had recorded a batch of acoustic demos on a four-track cassette machine at his home, planning to hand them over to his band as a first draft for his next studio effort (which would eventually become 1984's
Born in the U.S.A.). After several attempts to record full-band versions of the songs, he realized he was incapable of recapturing the dark, slightly unsettling power of his cassette demos, and chose instead to release them in their original form, mastered from a mix-down tape made on a boom box.
Springsteen began exploring the underside of the American Dream on 1978's
Darkness on the Edge of Town and 1980's
The River, and
Nebraska took this storytelling from a gloomy twilight to the forbidding darkness of a moonless night.
Nebraska's tales of crime, murder, desperation, and grim consequence took the themes of his previous two albums to their logical conclusions while filling them with a dread and grim poetry that was utterly unforced and all the more powerful for it. Though the occasional bits of repeated lyrics and similar melodies give away the fact this was not meant to be the final form for these songs, they make absolute sense for the characters, who speak with a minimalist eloquence about lives gone or going wrong and the forces outside their grasp that led them there.
Nebraska is not an album without hope, but these songs come from a place where no one has any illusions about the odds stacked against them, and the finale, "Reason to Believe," speaks of the need to move forward while knowing what they may find might be even worse than where they are.
Born in the U.S.A. would build on many of the same ideas in a less extreme and more artful presentation, yet
Nebraska was the purest expression of the bleak core of
Springsteen's songwriting, and it remains one of his most affecting works. ~ Mark Deming
