Bruce Springsteen does not receive enough credit for challenging his image. Public perception can break a potential artist. It can pigeonhole them forever. Nebraska, like The River, is a chance to change that for Springsteen. His cold outlook and the chills to follow this 1982 effort are a direct shot at the Born to Run style which defined him. It still does, to be fair, but that does not make Nebraska a failure. Far from it. He is still putting his personable approach on the line with contemporary releases like Letter to You and even the cover album Only the Strong Survive has its moments of strength. More than a few. Nebraska, too, has a strength within which is tapped by Springsteen on this solo effort. This is what isolation does to a man. Surrounded by well-tapped influences, Springsteen searches for clarity in a storm of superstardom.
One man and his guitar still, to this day, can sound as staggering as it does on the title track. Nebraska is a heart-wrenching experience from start to end. Here is Springsteen openly appreciating and toying with the influences, contemporary and historic. Nebraska is an opener which is simply beyond compare. One of his best songs because of the intimacy, the lack of frills around it. Springsteen was right to pull this one away from The E Street Band. As brilliant as they are, there is little they can add to this set of songs, so open they are. Atlantic City may be the more remembered of the two but it is nowhere close to the mesmerising power of the title track. Springsteen must know it too, relying on his harmonica for Mansion On the Hill and all the glory it hints at. Or, at least, would hint at it if it were not for those cold edges of town.
Despair is key to this and while it is clear to read on the post-success of Born to Run and Darkness on the Edge of Town, it still feels like a shot. Here is a man defined by the rock and roll style, pouring his heart with the same emotional tones and turmoil of his earliest, best works. Pair him with two instruments and a small recording setup and you get gut-punch pieces like the title track or My Father’s House. Those few moments throughout which boast something equivalent to upbeat are tinged with an irony. Where Springsteen finds volatile energy is in the arrests and familial breakdown of Johnny 99 and Highway Patrolman. More and more, Nebraska feels like the real side of America. A country which Springsteen wants to forget about, focusing on the flow of instrumental booms as a way of paving over and providing a brighter future.
Nebraska is the alternative. A powerful piece of work. One of the best pieces he ever wrote is that four-and-a-half-minute opener. These tones would inspire a reactive force on Born in the U.S.A., an album misread because of its light and brisk tone. There is no misreading Nebraska. What we want to believe and what happens are two separate spheres. Springsteen knows this. Nebraska is a bold piece of work not just because it dismantles the image of its writer as a showy, stadium-touring star, but because it redefines him. This is an artist who could have kept these emotive tones bottled up but, in telling these stories, in howling on State Trooper and finding a cause of pain and memory in Used Cars, we can hear a wounded, personable side to The Boss. Whatever the man says or does in tying himself to the working man is no stronger than what he does here. He lays his life and experiences on the line, the moments and books which inspired him to champion the everyday. Nebraska remains a fine achievement.
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