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

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Given the way Springsteen has interviewed throughout his career, it shouldn’t have come as a surprise that he seemed to hold back nothing. A lot of critics have pointed out the cinematic sweep of this material even though, like Dylan’s John Wesley Harding (1967), only the final track breaks four minutes, and the word “minimal” feels overwrought. They were recorded at a time when technology was not yet capable of making the kinds of fixes that can be made easily today. edu/facpub/213/ "Since the 1970s, when mandatory sentencing swept the United States, sending more men and women to prison than ever before and for longer periods of time, life has been increasingly difficult for people who commit crime. Suspicious of the hype, we took pleasure when Springsteen’s PA system played Elvis Costello’s My Aim Is True (1977) for the early crowd—it sounded generous, like he cared about the same music that we did.

Nebraska was unfinished, imperfect, delivered into a world hovering at the threshold of the digital, when technology would allow recorded music to hang itself on perfect time, carry perfect pitch, but also risk losing its connection to the unfixed and unfixable.People often talk about 1980s MTV as the major turn toward a more visual music culture, but the more impactful visual turn came, I believe, when digital recording allowed music to be seen and, as a result, fixed, using the eyes as much as the ears. Springsteen’s charisma gave its breakout drama a blinding force, and the E Street Band players kept diving into grooves that felt too big for a single group, chasing their Big Idea Frontman, who kept racing out ahead. Tim Riley’s latest book is What Goes On: The Beatles, Their Music, and Their Time (2019), co-written with Walter Everett, from Oxford University Press. We know when we’re trying to make our images or our music look or sound better than they are, and it’s time to consider, on occasion, choosing not to. 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.

If I’d gone in the studio and just introduced that music in a normal way, I don’t know if ‘Nebraska’ would ever have occurred.

He told me in an interview for my book about the making of the album that he felt it couldn’t be “made better” and still manage to transmit the turbulence he’d captured. Nebraska expressed a darkness that was reflective of a mood in the country but 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.

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