Bruce Springsteen NEBRASKA

Around 1986, there was a Springsteen tribute called "Cover Me." I wonder if anyone there covered Nebraska songs?

"Atlantic City" is a fine, fine song. I've come close to covering it live myself, but then thought the better of it.

And yes, the Cowboy Junkies "State Trooper" is good. I thought there was a Mary Lou Lord cover of something on Nebraska but I may be misremembering.

factoid: nebraska is the easiest-to-play guitar album in rock history.

kingsmen, hah! the history of rock is full of amateur guitarists who clearly had no idea how to play the minor-fifth that defines them. therefore, i declare, they are not easy to play! as for the urinals and rhys chatham, your theory that fcc has never heard them is correct.

hell yeah. on nebraska he plays things really simply but also really effectively. on darkness on the edge of town he lets rip some of my favorite gtr solos ever. he's a really melodic, smart player who obviously thinks about his parts and his tone a LOT. in fact, the guitar's about the only thing that sounds good on a lot of his records, which were never recorded all that great. the guitar and his voice, actually. he's good at recording himself!

i never understood why he always insisted on touring with at least one extra, and sometimes two extra, hot-shot lead guitarists. but funnily enough, even with nils lofgren and steve van zandt onstage with him, he still takes a lot of the solos himself.

Fucking beautiful.

Nebraska, arranged and performed by... Mark Ribot, Vernon Reid, Gary Lucas, The National, Meshell Ndegeocello, Michelle Shocked, Kevin Kinney, Mark Eitzel, Laura Cantrell, Jesse Harris, Martha Wainwright, Chocolate Genius, Dan Zanes, Lenny Kaye, and Harry Manx

!!!

I just did a couple of shows with a guy who covered "State Trooper". It was a blast, because we ended up Kraut-rocking it and extracting some Neil Young from it.

Also covered that Suicide song "Dream Baby Dream" that Bruce used to cover. Bruce is a deadly songwriter.

he covered it this year!

speaking of the band, what strikes me listening to electric nebraska for the first time is how little he uses them even there. it's pretty much guitar bass drums all the way through. i noticed roy on exactly one song, and danny and clarence on none.

i like the nebraska outtakes he recorded alone a lot more.

I haven't heard the electric version, but to be fair, the attempts were abandoned *because* he didn't think it was working, so I suppose it makes sense that the released versions would disappoint.

yes. the one thing the original tracks box set taught me was that springsteen has a really good ear for what does and doesn't work in his own music.

Seriously, anyone that couldn't find a place for "Because the Night" (among other songs) is absolutely ruthless.

writer Will Hermes noted in his substack this Youtube Nebraska rabbit hole

http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL56kf2P_2D2wfrhVNVTAus705q8bJOKb-

Hermes also asserts-

And a funny thing happened in its wake — a generation of musicians, weaned on punk, and looking to transplant the beating bloody heart of a song onto magnetic tape, did so using the DIY bedroom recording template of Nebraska. As a fan of raw songwriting and lo-fi dreamspaces, I see a smeared line from Nebraska to the Replacements’ Let It Be and Elliott Smith’s Roman Candle, to records by Billy Bragg and Robyn Hitchcock, Beat Happening and Galaxie 500, Lucinda Williams and Cowboy Junkies, the Pogues, the Meat Puppets, Tracy Chapman, even De La Soul and the Beastie Boys.

Hermes also mentions something that seems even more a bit exaggerated to me -

The National's Matt Berninger, who makes a connection of his own in Warren Zanes’ book Deliver Me From Nowhere: The Making of Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska

Berninger wasn’t the only one who took it that way. However different in scale and effect, Nebraska did for some what the Beatles’ appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show in 1964 did for so many at that time. It said, “You can do this.” “I think Nebraska set so many bands on their way,” Berninger insisted. “Every band that went after a lo-fi, DIY kind of thing. Pavement, Silver Jews, Guided by Voices, all the early indie stuff. I think Nebraska was the big bang of the indie rock that was about making shit alone in your bedroom. It’s like when Justin Vernon made For Emma, Forever Ago. I’m sure he was trying to make his version of Nebraska when he did that. And he did. Justin Vernon’s record changed the landscape. That project is a child of Nebraska.”

1982: The Year Post-Punk Broke

Bruce invented Soundcloud rap.

Damn.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nuC9rSEU-M0

xps I think this is another case of an album really being one link in a chain of a continuing and evolving idea. I don't doubt some great lo-fi recordings were directly inspired by Nebraska, but it's not for nothing that Springsteen constantly thought of the past when he recorded it - he didn't just emulate the sound of Sun Records and beyond, he arguably replicated a setup that wasn't unheard of in the earlier days of popular music. Robert Johnson recorded like half of his work in a hotel room where it was basically the room, a microphone, the recorder and not much else (though tbf, I think they ran the recorder into an adjacent room just so they wouldn't be occupying the same place). But sometimes you need someone to revisit the past to prove that what worked then can still be equally effective now and shouldn't be left behind altogether.

Funny how to my ears the electric versions sound more tentative and demo-y than the released versions.

i believe that's also how it sounded to bruce's ears :)

sometimes you need someone to revisit the past to prove that what worked then can still be equally effective now and shouldn't be left behind altogether

good post

xp yeah, you can really hear the sense of discomfort with trying to get into that Nebraska headspace in front of other people

Oh gosh I actually quite liked this movie despite my general antipathy towards artist biopics…but I am not super invested in Bruce and was expecting it to be way awful.

I’m super interested in Bruce and Jon’s relationship. It’s so interesting to me, seems like a really authentic respect and love thing that is pretty uniquely non-toxic when it comes to performer/manager relationships?

Can’t believe they made up the romance stuff loooool

For some reason “where’s the case for this” cracked me up.

Appreciate that the story swirled around mental illness and didn’t avoid calling it out as depression, idk resonated with me kinda

My wife is a Springsteen fanatic and thought it was pretty weak

So many thoughts about the '82 collection I don't know where to start. I'm finding the live performance oddly fascinating and moving; I wondered at first why Bruce felt the need to re-perform Nebraska as part of this collection, but hearing it, there's an emotional logic to it. You hear Electric Nebraska first, where he's trying to share these songs with the band and it's not quite working, and you get the sense that Springsteen has dug something up from the depths of his psyche that needs to live at those depths and those pressures and can't survive the trip to the surface. And then you hear the live performance, and it absolutely does work, and you realize that Springsteen, even now, decades later, can still step into that world of Nebraska at any moment, provided he does it alone. You really get the sense of what a solitary world Nebraska is, and how much it dictates the terms of how you can engage with it.

That said, I haven't finished listening to the live performance yet; I had to stop after "Mansion on the Hill," which I found particularly moving because the age in Springsteen's voice becomes the age of the narrator, and it really hits home that this man has lived out his entire life in the shadow of the mansion. (It reminds me of the Ursula Guin short story "The Poacher" if anyone has read that?)

Really interesting, too, to see the link between the Nebraska outtakes, the Electric Nebraska stuff and Born in the USA - there are all these gaps being filled in.

Like, the two iterations of Downbound Train are fascinating; I had no idea this was the one BitUSA track that started out up-tempo and got slower as he revised it. You can see him looking for something and not quite finding it yet. It’s so astonishing to hear the yelping desperation of the Nebraska demo, and then the repetitive punk shouting of the Electric Nebraska version, and remember that this will turn into the first really quiet, dreamy, floaty moment on Born in the USA, the moment when the drums finally drop out and the synths carry us away.

I already knew Child Bride, but I hadn’t listened to it in a few years and had almost forgotten how good it is. I had forgotten the line, “They said she was too young / she was no younger than I been / when she put her arms around me / and the night closed in” and the way Springsteen’s voice wavers into silence on the last word, and so it hit me all over again. That one line is so good, so concisely and efficiently chilling, that I wondered if he borrowed it from somewhere. Not because I think he couldn’t have written it, but because it feels like a classic, like something that must already have existed.

And then the first version of Workin’ on the Highway is another missing link, because you can see that the central operating framework of Born in the USA - the idea that you can take the darkest stories you can think of and package them as cheerful arena rock anthems - isn’t in place yet at all. Having decided to rewrite Child Bride as a workin’ man’s rock song, he approaches it by taking out the whole grooming-and-kidnapping part of the story and replacing it with a generic, and presumably legal, love story. And it’s cool to hear this, and all the versions of "Born in the USA," and realize that there’s a major step in Springsteen’s artistic development still to come.

Because one of the most disturbing things in Child Bride is that the narrator doesn’t really seem to get that he’s committed a crime. He knows he was arrested and is in prison, and that he won’t get the girl back, and he seems to accept all that, and yet there’s this weird disconnect in the way he tells the story, like this is all just something that happened to him, not the result of anything he did. It’s brilliantly done, and I think Springsteen could absolutely have released Child Bride as it was. But turning it into Workin’ on the Highway is brilliant too, because in the final version the fun times workin’ man anthem quality of the song is what creates that disconnect, that sense that the narrator doesn’t fully get the story he’s telling us, even as he’s giving us all the details accurately. And that's what makes the dark anthems on BitUSA so good - that the anthemic quality is part of the story, that you can write a song about being alone in your room that sounds like you’re fizzing with restless energy and about to burst out of your own skin, that a song about how your country has failed to live up to its promises is at its most powerful when it sounds like the patriotic song you wish it could be.

typo in my post upthread - I meant Ursula Le Guin, of course

Yes great observations about the evolution of those songs. Honestly the most interesting thing about the outtakes to me is that imo all of the songs are better in their released versions — whether on Nebraska or BitUSA — and the iterations along the way are a good workshop in songwriting. Finding the idea, playing with it, knocking it around, working out what the song is trying to be or say.

I find the backstories -- the songwriting, the recordings, the reactions from E Streeters -- so fascinating that I wished I enjoyed Nebraska more.

Have they monkeyed with the demos to fake-up a 'new' electric session or are these just cleaned up versions of genuine old recordings they found?

xpost for me nebraska was not in the lofi lineage which was 70s bootlegs and weird 80s cassettes; nebraska is a plastic ono band, side one of rust never sleeps, that kind of big rocker stripping things wayyy down. i’m sure there are more.

by far my favorite bruce and plastic ono and rust are my favorites by those artists, i should think harder about this putative class

I think what's key is that "Nebraska" is not strictly some unplugged session, however unvarnished, it was literally a bunch of demos that they spent a bunch of time desperately trying to clean up. Like, those 70s bootlegs and weird 80s cassettes and whatnot are lo-fi by nature, unprofessional/amateur recordings, worn down by several generations of fan trading. But "Nebraska," it's lo-fi by design, not a lo-fi version of something meant to sound better/cleaner. Which Springsteen was smart enough to recognize and/or get released while he could, which is a pretty radical artistic statement.

I think people sometimes get jumbled up about the difference between professional 4-track recording and home recording on one of these little TEAC or whatever boxes. Yes, most of the Beatles stuff was recorded to 4-track machines, but they were far from lo-fi. Or "Rust Never Sleeps," a lot of that was taken from live recordings, but professionally so, and then heavily overdubbed in the studio. I'm trying to think of a proper lo-fi precursor to "Nebraska" ...

The thing that struck me in the film (not sure how accurate) was how running the cassette through a the studio console created all this distortion that wasn’t there when they listened on the boombox, like the problem wasn’t that it sounded thin and demo-y as much as unlistenably distorted.

kind of like the pixelization when making a low res image file really big or something

I think that's a pretty evocative comparison!

That part is puzzling to me, there's no reason that a cassette machine correctly plugged into two channels of a mixing console (with the input levels set correctly, of course) would distort, the only major difference would be that the studio monitors might have emphasised the flaws/weaknesses that the boombox speakers did not.

Yeah, same, I had never heard of such a thing

I'm trying to think of a proper lo-fi precursor to "Nebraska"

Basement Tapes

...particularly the original, unoverdubbed copies that circulated before the official release.

Well, yeah, but again, that wasn't meant for release and circulated as bootlegs. And even then, they had multiple mics set up, a mixing board, possibly a reel to reel ...

I don't consider Nebraska lo-fi at all

people make a big deal that he used 2 Shure 57s but those have been on so many records, pretty much every single live show you've ever seen. Bono uses a Shure 58 on U2 albums which is basically the same mic as the 57 except it's a round top for vox instead of the flat head of the 47 (I think there may be some slight eq difference too but same capsule as far as I remember)

yeah I never got the lo fi claims, this isn't Robert Johnson in 1938 doing everything in one take with one mono mic at all

just nitpicking realy, it’s definitely low-tech

What it is is spooky. The technical combinations are interesting, but the effect is greater than their sum. It has such a particular American noir vibe. I assume that's what Springsteen heard on it, it sounded like the places and people he was describing.

In my teens a good friend made me a double-sided cassette with Nebraska on one side and Tonight's The Night on the other, so I've always connected the two in both mood and documentary-like recording choices (the swaying-in-front-of-the-mic in "Mellow My Mind," for example).

Re: the Robert Johnson comparison, cutting to disc is going to be different to recording to tape, especially tape that can be overdubbed, but I was thinking more of the setup where you could just record in a regular room meant for habitation, not a professional facility built and designed for recording. Someone mentioned "the Basement Tapes" and Dylan is a perfect example - home recordings made in the folk tradition of preservation is pretty much done with the same approach. (The new Dylan box set has a lot of these where he's in someone's home and they run a tape. On the one hand, not professional and not something a label would agree to put out back then due to the recording conditions, but it's also clear few if any fans thought they were "unlistenable" when they became extremely popular bootlegs.)

But also just think of all the minutiae that Springsteen got used to in recording an album, where it's a very slow process and even physically how you perform can feel constricted, and it's a common anecdote where a recording artist just wants to do something and an engineer or producer will push back, giving technicals reason the performer has to accommodate. I think stuff like that became much more common as recording became more sophisticated and demands like cleaner separation or better fidelity became greater and greater. Whatever Robert Johnson had to accommodate in the 1930s, it wasn't so burdensome that he couldn't just do it sitting in a hotel room.

https://substack.com/inbox/post/177026285

It's all good (essay from Buffalo Tom's Bill Janovitz) but the ending is chilling:

In the album’s title track, “Nebraska,” Springsteen adopted the “meanness in this world” from O’Connor’s “A Good Man is Hard to Find” story, dropping into the voice of the real-life serial killer, Charles Starkweather, who inspired the great 1973 Terrence Malick film, Badlands, which in turn inspired the song. In Springsteen’s depiction of Starkweather, the killer attributes the senseless, detached murders as a response to that meanness, as if he were just caught up in it. Starkweather, though, never used those words nor indicated as much. But he did write that he and his girlfriend accomplice, Caril Ann Fugate just wanted to “have fun.”

The meanness in that song, explained almost as if the killers were mud on a bad karmic wheel of the world, was overt and resulted in eleven people dying. The meanness of “Highway Patrolman” is more subtle and personally felt and dealt. There’s the blatant violence of the climax, but more primary is the vague and intimate brotherly meanness, with the narrator starting the song by characterizing his brother as “no good.” Not troubled, or struggling, or capable of bad actions, but simply and absolutely “no good.” The narrator feels the world’s meanness in the form of wheat prices dropping and the lifelong burden of trying to catch and right his wayward brother. He does nothing to explain possible reasons for Franky’s bad actions. Even as he explains that he took Maria and took the job, the cop takes it for granted that he is the righteous, upright citizen, stoically carrying on in the face of the meanness of the world, like Cormac McCarthy’s Sheriff Ed Tom Bell character in No Country For Old Men. Though the song begins as a testimony, delivering his name, rank, and barracks number, the vocal delivery is almost that of a man sighing out the whole tale. The patrolman seems more relieved than anything else by the end of the song, no longer having to care for his brother or have him there as a reminder of his own failings.

Different people feel the world’s meanness in varying degrees and intensity. Depending on where you live, how old you are, your station in life, or your mental health, the meanness can sometimes feel more distant and life more generally hopeful. But one would have to be completely detached not to feel absolutely beaten down by the world’s meanness in late 2025. In this country, meanness has rarely, if ever, been more celebrated. Hypocrisy is laughably irrelevant. Shamelessness is a superpower. Cruelty is virtuous and synonymous with strength. One has to feel severely insecure and frightened to take such pleasure as to make so many others feel small and insignificant at best, and parasitic at worst; people sent away, imprisoned, or killed without any due process or justice. Heroes are now villains. “I like people who weren’t captured,” said the guy who got a deferment. That same year, he mocked a person’s disability at a rally. It was only the beginning. Long live the mad King from Queens! He’s the real hero! One worth staging an insurrection for! He will surely pardon us winged monkeys who minister to his cruelty.

I kept a notebook of various Buddhist and related wisdom back at the turn of the last century. One quote I noted was “People are at their cruelest when they are intentionally avoiding suffering.” It’s basic Buddhist dharma, but presented in a particularly effective way. Most suffering stems from insecurity, a challenged sense of self or ego, or a lack of economic or physical well-being. My simplistic theory is that such insecurity can generally be seen as the source of much of humanity’s cruelty.

If cruelty is the sign of someone who is suffering, then we are being led by one of the most insecure suffering bastards in history, wallowing in his own hell-on-earth. We encounter ordinary meanness from people almost every day. But rarely has it been this heightened and obvious. We watch as one person projects his vanity and insecurities, surrounding himself with other pathetic creatures similarly suffering, creating a dark new reality that affects the whole world. The problem here is that he is creating a hell for all of us. He has also given permission for his and his team’s collective meanness to become the default for his followers, who welcome and wallow in cruelty, having voted for him three times. We have all heard or read the now-cliché, “the cruelty is the point.” Most of the time, it seems precisely true.

What is it you’re afraid of? Is the world changing from what you once perceived it to be? Is AI going to destroy us? Are immigrants here to take your place? Are your grandkids now proudly expressing who they are, unlike the days when people had to hide it? Do you feel left behind in this changing economy that, by design, encourages an ever-widening gyre of extreme inequity? Is your gated community fortified enough to protect you when the pitchforks and torches come for you? Do people need billions of dollars in order to feel secure and powerful enough? Who hurt you, Elon? Your father, right?

Bad behavior is often explained by one’s upbringing. But how do people who were raised with an unchallenged sense of security, with a value set that stressed compassion, kindness, and understanding, and who turned out predictably liberal, make sense of their elderly parents knowingly voting for cruelty and corruption at least two of the last three elections? “What’s so funny ‘bout peace, love, and understanding?” That was written by Nick Lowe, ironically, in the early ‘70s, a poke at idealistic hippie music. Lowe knew then that the meanness of the world was ever at hand, and a song asking to “smile on your brother” and “love one another” was the height of futility.

Meanness is having the hour, which seems to make a great many people gleeful. Meanness is hogging the road like a semi tailgating you at 75 miles per hour in the middle lane. I long for a day when I can pull over on the side of the highway and watch the taillights disappear.

Josh, your post made me think of something I wrote about Nebraska when I first listened to it about six years ago. I wanted to share it here but wasn't sure how, so I just made a really basic substack with exactly one post in it. If anyone's interested, here's me in 2019 discovering Nebraska for the first time while also being really burned out from my first year of teaching.

I hope this link works!

That's a lot better writing than anything in his Cars book.

xpost Good essay! Fascinating to read some of the parallels to the thing I posted.

Yeah that's great Lily. I like your take on "Reason to Believe," I feel like that song teeters ambiguously in that tension you describe, between knowing all these situations are hopeless but understanding why people reach for hope anyway. Which includes Bruce, obviously. He's really arguing with himself all the way through the album, and that song is where he lands. It's the "I can't go on. I'll go on." of rock n roll.

Still not sold, not going to see this movie, but was not expecting this:

https://www.indiewire.com/features/commentary/henry-selick-springsteen-deliver-me-from-nowhere-1235158777/

Walter Chaw's review is interesting and personal, if weirdly incomplete (it doubles as a retrospective on...Side A of Nebraska??) but mostly it highlights the compromised nature of the project, beginning with the title.

I still might watch it when it hits streaming.

I still have no actual wish to see the movie, but it does seem to be polarizing rather than a complete flop. My housemate, who saw the trailer, hated it, and has been following Deliver Me From Nowhere news with horrified fascination ever since, says that about one in seven critics seems to like the movie, and I think that's about right.

Here's this piece in Defector:
https://defector.com/dont-watch-deliver-me-from-nowhere-unless-you-want-to-cry-about-your-dad

And this one in Jacobin:
https://jacobin.com/2025/11/spingsteen-biopic-nebraska-white-strong

There's a kind of unifying thread of "this might not be a good movie but I still connected to it" that's interesting and almost tempts me to watch it.

haha, not me! I find nothing more dispiriting than a mediocre misfire.

"Almost" is the key word here. It makes me wonder if at some distant point in the future I'll find myself at a place in my life where this movie speaks to me. It sounds like a combo of parts that are earnestly bad and things that actually work, and right now I think I would cringe much too hard at the bad parts to get anything out of the rest of it. But I'm glad there are people who like it!