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NEBRASKA was a lo-fi fever dream populated by conflicted cops and serial killers, the lost and the lonely. The desperate characters haunting its grooves came amid a dramatic evolution in Springsteen\u2019s writing style and his view of the country he lived in. Yet at the time, The Boss worried whether, by releasing what was essentially a solo home demo, he was throwing everything away. \u201cI got to wondering, What the hell am I doing?\u201d he recalls.<\/i><\/p>\n
[\/et_pb_text][et_pb_text module_class=”credit-names” _builder_version=”4.20.4″ _module_preset=”default” text_font_size=”14px” text_orientation=”center” hover_enabled=”0″ global_colors_info=”{}” theme_builder_area=”post_content” sticky_enabled=”0″]<\/p>\n
Words: David Fricke [\/et_pb_text][et_pb_image src=”https:\/\/flatplan-plus-content.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/7\/2025\/07\/iohoihoij.jpg” title_text=”iohoihoij” _builder_version=”4.20.4″ _module_preset=”default” hover_enabled=”0″ global_colors_info=”{}” theme_builder_area=”post_content” sticky_enabled=”0″][\/et_pb_image][et_pb_text module_class=”text-with-dropcap” _builder_version=”4.20.4″ _module_preset=”default” hover_enabled=”0″ global_colors_info=”{}” theme_builder_area=”post_content” sticky_enabled=”0″]<\/p>\n THE CASSETTE FIT into the front pocket of Bruce Springsteen\u2019s denim jacket, which is where he kept it for months \u2013 without a case \u2013 in early 1982: more than a dozen new songs in stark, solo demos, some in multiple versions and mixes, recorded that winter on a portable 4-track machine in his New Jersey home. But the tape weighed a ton in the singer\u2019s head \u2013 part talisman, part conscience \u2013 as he started working with the E Street Band on a new album, the intended follow-up to Springsteen\u2019s two-disc epic, 1980\u2019s The River<\/i>.<\/p>\n For three weeks in late April and May at the Power Station in New York City, the music came like a freight train. Hot and tight after 138 shows in 1980 and \u201981, then the February \u201982 sessions for an album by R&B legend Gary US Bonds, Springsteen and the E Street Band recorded early master takes \u2013 straight from the floor \u2013 of songs from the cassette, including the foreboding grind of Downbound Train and Child Bride, a set of lyrics rewired into the hard-luck rockabilly jolt Working On The Highway.<\/p>\n \u201cWe had a particular way of working \u2013 which was everything was live,\u201d recalled Chuck Plotkin, a mixing engineer on 1978\u2019s Darkness On The<\/i> Edge Of Town<\/i> and The River<\/i> who was back at the console, co-producing this time with Springsteen, his manager Jon Landau and E Street guitarist Steven Van Zandt. \u201cIt was a rock band, and the guys could play,\u201d Plotkin says. \u201cThere was a certain vitality that you got from not doing 2,700 takes of things\u201d \u2013 a refreshing change from the leader\u2019s notorious perfectionism in the studio.<\/p>\n [\/et_pb_text][et_pb_image src=”https:\/\/flatplan-plus-content.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/7\/2025\/07\/3.png” title_text=”3″ _builder_version=”4.20.4″ _module_preset=”default” hover_enabled=”0″ global_colors_info=”{}” theme_builder_area=”post_content” sticky_enabled=”0″][\/et_pb_image][et_pb_text _builder_version=”4.20.4″ _module_preset=”default” hover_enabled=”0″ global_colors_info=”{}” theme_builder_area=”post_content” sticky_enabled=”0″]<\/p>\n One song came to unexpected life at the Power Station when Springsteen called for a pass at an idea that had evolved over several demos, in different tempos and vocal approaches, from a blues simply called Vietnam into a scathing indictment of patriotic hypocrisy. Springsteen called it Born In The USA.<\/p>\n \u201cTo me, it was a dead song,\u201d Landau later confessed to Springsteen biographer Dave Marsh, \u201cone of the lesser songs\u201d on the cassette \u2013 until the singer came up with the titanic entrance: a synthesizer riff played by pianist Roy Bittan and detonated like an arena-rock bomb by drummer Max Weinberg. Everything else came together in the second take.<\/p>\n [\/et_pb_text][et_pb_image src=”https:\/\/flatplan-plus-content.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/7\/2025\/07\/vavaca.jpg” title_text=”vavaca” _builder_version=”4.20.4″ _module_preset=”default” hover_enabled=”0″ global_colors_info=”{}” theme_builder_area=”post_content” sticky_enabled=”0″][\/et_pb_image][et_pb_text module_class=”image-gallery-caption” _builder_version=”4.20.4″ _module_preset=”default” text_font=”|300|||||||” text_font_size=”16px” text_line_height=”1.2em” custom_margin=”-10px||||false|false” hover_enabled=”0″ global_colors_info=”{}” theme_builder_area=”post_content” sticky_enabled=”0″]<\/p>\n Reason to believe: Nebraska-era Bruce with his Gibson J-200.<\/p>\n [\/et_pb_text][et_pb_text module_class=”text-with-dropcap” _builder_version=”4.20.4″ _module_preset=”default” hover_enabled=”0″ global_colors_info=”{}” theme_builder_area=”post_content” sticky_enabled=”0″]<\/p>\n But then Springsteen hit a brick wall: the eerie, insular force of the tape in his pocket. \u201cThere wasn\u2019t a single song on there that we didn\u2019t record with the band,\u201d Plotkin noted. But many of them resisted the full-group brawn: the recurring violence on devastated landscapes in Atlantic City, Johnny 99 and Highway Patrolman; the bitter cycles of aspiration and disappointment in Mansion On The Hill and Reason To Believe.<\/p>\n \u201cI realised I\u2019d succeeded in doing nothing but damaging what I\u2019d created,\u201d Springsteen said of the Power Station treatments in his 2016 memoir, Born To Run. \u201cWe got it to sound cleaner, more hi-fi, but not nearly as atmospheric, as authentic.<\/p>\n \u201cAll popular artists get caught between making records and making music,\u201d he continued. \u201cIf you\u2019re lucky, sometimes it\u2019s the same thing\u201d \u2013 but not this time. \u201cSatisfied that I\u2019d explored the music\u2019s possibilities and every blind alley, I pulled out the original cassette I\u2019d been carrying around in my jeans pocket and said, This is it.\u201d<\/p>\n Five months later, on September 30, 1982, Springsteen issued 10 songs from that tape \u2013 unchanged, with the murk intact after much trial and error in the mastering \u2013 as his sixth album, naming it after the desolate setting and harrowing chill of the opening ballad: Nebraska<\/i>.<\/p>\n [\/et_pb_text][et_pb_image src=”https:\/\/flatplan-plus-content.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/7\/2025\/07\/4-1-scaled.jpg” title_text=”BADLANDS (1973) SISSY SPACEK, MARTIN SHEEN BDLS 001 O\/S” _builder_version=”4.20.4″ _module_preset=”default” hover_enabled=”0″ global_colors_info=”{}” theme_builder_area=”post_content” sticky_enabled=”0″][\/et_pb_image][et_pb_text module_class=”image-gallery-caption” _builder_version=”4.20.4″ _module_preset=”default” text_font=”|300|||||||” text_font_size=”16px” text_line_height=”1.2em” custom_margin=”-10px||||false|false” hover_enabled=”0″ global_colors_info=”{}” theme_builder_area=”post_content” sticky_enabled=”0″]<\/p>\n Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacek in Badlands.<\/p>\n [\/et_pb_text][et_pb_text module_class=”text-with-dropcap” _builder_version=”4.20.4″ _module_preset=”default” hover_enabled=”0″ global_colors_info=”{}” theme_builder_area=”post_content” sticky_enabled=”0″]<\/p>\n MORE THAN 40 years on, Nebraska is one of rock\u2019s greatest accidental triumphs, one of the most important albums Springsteen has ever released \u2013 he had just turned 33 \u2013 yet originally made with no thought of it being a record at all. It is a masterpiece of uneasy listening: raw drafts in field-recording turbulence of a terse, visceral turn in Springsteen\u2019s songwriting, steeped in blood, sorrow and the blunt, confessional vernacular of the jailhouse and unemployment line. \u201cTen innocent people\u201d die in the first verse of Nebraska alone, Springsteen\u2019s imagined confession of the real-life teenage serial murderer Charles Starkweather; harmonica breaks rise over the song\u2019s blasted plains and badlands like eulogies in smoke.<\/p>\n \u201cI had no conscious political agenda or social themes,\u201d Springsteen claimed in his autobiography. \u201cI was after a feeling, a tone that felt like the world I\u2019d known and still carried inside me.\u201d Here are the working-class strivers, drop-outs from that race and dreamers on the fringe that filled the boardwalk nights and endless-highway rides of Springsteen\u2019s first three albums, the crescendo of escape and ecstasy that peaked on 1975\u2019s Born To Run<\/i>. But there is a lot less hope in these cycles of crime and reckoning, of ordinary folk pressed to desperate measures: the spectral fatalism at Sun-rockabilly speed in Johnny 99 and State Trooper; the paychecks that never go far enough in the haunted country of Mansion On The Hill and simmering anger of Used Cars; the slim chance at redemption in the ghostly sweetness of Atlantic City, undercut in the last verse by the tug of a fast, tainted buck. <\/p>\n [\/et_pb_text][et_pb_image src=”https:\/\/flatplan-plus-content.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/7\/2025\/07\/7.png” title_text=”7″ _builder_version=”4.20.4″ _module_preset=”default” hover_enabled=”0″ global_colors_info=”{}” theme_builder_area=”post_content” sticky_enabled=”0″][\/et_pb_image][et_pb_text _builder_version=”4.20.4″ _module_preset=”default” hover_enabled=”0″ global_colors_info=”{}” theme_builder_area=”post_content” sticky_enabled=”0″]<\/p>\n \u201cI was only making \u2018demos\u2019,\u201d Springsteen reiterated in Born To Run. And the stadium-scale last-chance dance of 1984\u2019s Born In The USA<\/i> is clearly shaking in these bones \u2013 \u201cThe characters and the stories, the style of writing\u2026 except it\u2019s just in the rock-band setting,\u201d as he told Rolling Stone at the time \u2013 while Nebraska<\/i> was waiting for its second chance on E Street. Two years after its release, Springsteen played all but two songs from the album in the first week of his Born In<\/i> The USA<\/i> tour. Of those, Atlantic City, Johnny 99 and Mansion On The Hill, all of which failed the Power Station test, were still coming around in 2016 and 2017 set lists.<\/p>\n But Nebraska<\/i> was a compelling, coherent mission in its own right, long before Springsteen decided it was an album: the artist documenting a profound change in his lyric voice and rock\u2019n\u2019roll classicism with nothing but the band in his head. \u201cNever before has a major recording artist made himself so vulnerable or open,\u201d Joel Selvin wrote in the San Francisco Chronicle, reviewing Nebraska<\/i> in October 1982. \u201cOnly somebody who is as trusted, known and loved as Springsteen could get away with dashing off a few, quick sketches, throwing them in frames and mounting them on the gallery walls.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThe Nebraska<\/i> demos turned the idea of urban folk music on its head,\u201d Marsh wrote in 1987\u2019s Glory Days: Bruce Springsteen In The 1980s. \u201cRather than appropriating the folk songs themselves, Springsteen worked with his own characteristic melodic ideas and lyrics that were utterly contemporary.\u201d<\/p>\n The effect was improbably commercial: Nebraska<\/i> went to Number 3 in both the US and the UK, ultimately selling over a million copies in America. \u201cAn artist could never get closer to his audience than this,\u201d Steve Van Zandt told Marsh in Glory Days. \u201cNot because it was done with an acoustic guitar, but because he was literally singing for himself.\u201d<\/p>\n The guitarist went even further in his own memoir, 2021\u2019s Unrequited Infatuations, declaring Nebraska<\/i> \u201camong the most uncompromising and uncommercial recordings any major artist has ever released.\u201d After that album, he said, Springsteen\u2019s \u201ccredibility\u201d was \u201cforever bulletproof\u201d.<\/p>\n [\/et_pb_text][et_pb_image src=”https:\/\/flatplan-plus-content.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/7\/2025\/07\/hrykfn.jpg” title_text=”hrykfn” _builder_version=”4.20.4″ _module_preset=”default” hover_enabled=”0″ global_colors_info=”{}” theme_builder_area=”post_content” sticky_enabled=”0″][\/et_pb_image][et_pb_text module_class=”image-gallery-caption” _builder_version=”4.20.4″ _module_preset=”default” text_font=”|300|||||||” text_font_size=”16px” text_line_height=”1.2em” custom_margin=”-10px||||false|false” hover_enabled=”0″ global_colors_info=”{}” theme_builder_area=”post_content” sticky_enabled=”0″]<\/p>\n Things just get really dark: The Boss awaits his muse, 1982.<\/p>\n [\/et_pb_text][et_pb_text module_class=”text-with-dropcap” _builder_version=”4.20.4″ _module_preset=”default” hover_enabled=”0″ global_colors_info=”{}” theme_builder_area=”post_content” sticky_enabled=”0″]<\/p>\n ON SEPTEMBER 14, 1981, Springsteen and the E Street Band finished their year-long tour for The River<\/i> with a 28-song marathon at the Riverfront Coliseum in Cincinnati, Ohio. It was Springsteen\u2019s last concert with his group for three years. Nebraska<\/i> was already underway. Springsteen wrote Mansion On The Hill \u2013 his first song in that body of shadows and troubles \u2013 on the road.<\/p>\n [\/et_pb_text][et_pb_text _builder_version=”4.20.4″ _module_preset=”default” hover_enabled=”0″ global_colors_info=”{}” theme_builder_area=”post_content” sticky_enabled=”0″]<\/p>\n In Hank Williams\u2019s ballad of the same name, a Top 20 hit in March 1949, the singer\u2019s longing is for the woman in that house, beyond his reach and station. The conflicted yearning in Springsteen\u2019s song came from his own youth. \u201cMy father was always transfixed by money,\u201d he said, introducing the song on the opening night of the Born In The USA<\/i> tour in St Paul, Minnesota. \u201cHe used to drive out of town and look at this big white house. It became a kind of touchstone for me. Now, when I dream, sometimes I\u2019m on the outside looking in \u2013 and sometimes I\u2019m the man on the inside.\u201d\u00a0 <\/p>\n Springsteen tried multiple takes of Mansion On The Hill with the E Street Band, over three days at the Power Station. He only needed one day \u2013 forlorn harmonica against tip-toe acoustic picking; a surprisingly clear vocal in watery ripples of reverb \u2013 to get it right, at home, on that cassette.<\/p>\n [\/et_pb_text][et_pb_text module_class=”pull-quote” _builder_version=”4.20.4″ _module_preset=”default” header_2_text_align=”center” header_2_text_color=”#111111″ header_2_font_size=”46px” header_2_line_height=”1.2em” custom_margin=”||0px||false|false” hover_enabled=”0″ global_colors_info=”{}” theme_builder_area=”post_content” sticky_enabled=”0″]<\/p>\n [\/et_pb_text][et_pb_text _builder_version=”4.20.4″ _module_preset=”default” hover_enabled=”0″ global_colors_info=”{}” theme_builder_area=”post_content” sticky_enabled=”0″]<\/p>\n At the time, Springsteen was renting a ranch house in Colts Neck, New Jersey \u2013 the very area where he would later settle down and raise a family with his second wife, singer Patti Scialfa. \u201cI didn\u2019t go out much,\u201d he admitted to Rolling Stone\u2019s Kurt Loder in a 1984 cover story, \u201cand for some reason, I started to write. I wrote Nebraska, all those songs, in a couple of months.\u201d<\/p>\n Nebraska, the song, arrived after Springsteen saw Badlands \u2013 Terrence Malick\u2019s 1973 film based on Starkweather\u2019s 1957-\u201958 killing spree in Nebraska and Wyoming \u2013 and read a biography of the latter\u2019s girlfriend and accomplice Caril Fugate. \u201cYou can get to a point where nihilism, if that\u2019s the right word, is overwhelming,\u201d Springsteen said, explaining the connection, \u201cand the basic laws that society has set up \u2013 either religious or social laws \u2013 become meaningless. Things just get really dark.\u201d As he sang at the song\u2019s end, channelling Starkweather, \u201cThey wanted to know why I did what I did \/ Well, sir, I guess there\u2019s just a meanness in this world.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cI was interested in writing kind of smaller, writing with just detail,\u201d Springsteen went on in that interview, citing the taut, sardonic fiction of the Southern writer Flannery O\u2019Connor. He had also gone deeper into, as he wrote in Born To Run, the \u201ctoughness, wit and common wisdom\u201d of Woody Guthrie after reading Joe Klein\u2019s 1980 biography of the folk icon. Then there was Suicide \u2013 the New York electro-punk duo, whose 10-minute murder ballad hurricane Frankie Teardrop on 1977\u2019s Suicide<\/i> was a vivid, if unexpected, influence on Nebraska<\/i>\u2019s claustrophobic tensions and chugging low-end drone. Suicide\u2019s late singer Alan Vega, who met Springsteen in 1980 at the Power Station where they were both recording, remembered hearing State Trooper \u2013 with its whooping-vocal flourishes, one of Vega\u2019s signatures \u2013 after Nebraska<\/i> came out: \u201cI thought it was one of my albums that I had forgotten about. But it was Bruce!\u201d<\/p>\n [\/et_pb_text][et_pb_image src=”https:\/\/flatplan-plus-content.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/7\/2025\/07\/6.png” title_text=”6″ _builder_version=”4.20.4″ _module_preset=”default” hover_enabled=”0″ global_colors_info=”{}” theme_builder_area=”post_content” sticky_enabled=”0″][\/et_pb_image][et_pb_text module_class=”text-with-dropcap” _builder_version=”4.20.4″ _module_preset=”default” hover_enabled=”0″ global_colors_info=”{}” theme_builder_area=”post_content” sticky_enabled=”0″]<\/p>\n ACCORDING TO A persistent legend, Springsteen taped everything on the Nebraska<\/i> cassette in a single day, January 3, 1982, including versions of associated orphans (Losin\u2019 Kind) and subsequent B-sides (Pink Cadillac). Plotkin said he heard at least four stabs at Born In The USA. Recording certainly took longer, but the urgency was real \u2013 Springsteen getting the songs down in bare-minimum arrangements spiked with dramatic quirks (the distant hurrahs in Atlantic City, like a country preacher yelling down a subway tunnel; the yodelling kick-off of Johnny 99) on a TEAC Tascam Series 144 4-track recorder. His then-guitar tech, Mike Batlan, assisted.<\/p>\n [\/et_pb_text][et_pb_text _builder_version=”4.20.4″ _module_preset=”default” hover_enabled=”0″ global_colors_info=”{}” theme_builder_area=”post_content” sticky_enabled=”0″]<\/p>\n In a 2017 interview, Springsteen\u2019s longtime engineer Toby Scott \u2013 who worked for the singer for nearly 40 years and was instrumental in getting the Nebraska<\/i> cassette through its tortuous mastering phase \u2013 ran down the album\u2019s genesis, pointing out the inexperience and dodgy gear that contributed to the singular fidelity. The Tascam machine was relatively new on the professional market and Batlan \u201cdidn\u2019t have much of a chance to get familiar\u201d with it, Scott said. \u201cBut Bruce was eager to get going,\u201d resulting in \u201ca bit of distortion\u201d on some songs.<\/p>\n Springsteen mixed the 4-track recordings on a Panasonic boom box through \u201can old Gibson Echoplex\u201d unit, Scott said, \u201cwith an endless tape loop\u201d for that \u201950s rockabilly reverb. The Echoplex died soon after. Yet, Scott said, \u201cHere was the tape he was holding up in the studio and saying, \u2018There\u2019s just something about the atmosphere on this tape. Can\u2019t we just master off this?\u2019\u201d <\/p>\n [\/et_pb_text][et_pb_text module_class=”pull-quote” _builder_version=”4.20.4″ _module_preset=”default” header_2_text_align=”center” header_2_text_color=”#111111″ header_2_font_size=”46px” header_2_line_height=”1.2em” custom_margin=”||0px||false|false” hover_enabled=”0″ global_colors_info=”{}” theme_builder_area=”post_content” sticky_enabled=”0″]<\/p>\n [\/et_pb_text][et_pb_text module_class=”pullquote-name” _builder_version=”4.20.4″ _module_preset=”default” header_2_text_align=”center” header_2_font_size=”46px” header_2_line_height=”1.2em” header_3_text_align=”center” header_3_text_color=”#111111″ header_3_font_size=”38px” hover_enabled=”0″ global_colors_info=”{}” theme_builder_area=”post_content” sticky_enabled=”0″]<\/p>\n [\/et_pb_text][et_pb_text _builder_version=”4.20.4″ _module_preset=”default” hover_enabled=”0″ global_colors_info=”{}” theme_builder_area=”post_content” sticky_enabled=”0″]<\/p>\n Nebraska<\/i> went through four different mastering rooms in New York before Springsteen found satisfaction at the Atlantic Records studio on Broadway. <\/p>\n He also added one more song along the way, recorded spare and solo like the rest of the Nebraska<\/i> tape but five months later, in May 1982. My Father\u2019s House was a slender waltz in simple, staccato picking, Springsteen singing in a raspy baritone like he was shaking himself out of a bad dream \u2013 which, in effect, he was: a vision of himself as a child finding his family\u2019s old house empty and dilapidated, the troubled relationship with his father past any repair. There was truth in it too: Springsteen\u2019s frequent drives through his hometown, Freehold, New Jersey, \u201cpast the old houses I used to live in,\u201d he recalled, introducing the song on-stage in 1990. <\/p>\n \u201cI eventually got to wondering, What the hell am I doing?\u201d Springsteen continued, describing a visit to a psychiatrist who said, \u201cSomething bad happened and you keep going back to see if you can fix it or somehow make it right,\u201d adding: \u201cYou can\u2019t.\u201d<\/p>\n But Springsteen was still going back decades later \u2013 performing My Father\u2019s House every night, for 236 shows, in Springsteen On Broadway. It was the only Nebraska<\/i> song in the show.<\/p>\n [\/et_pb_text][et_pb_image src=”https:\/\/flatplan-plus-content.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/7\/2025\/07\/00.jpg” title_text=”00″ _builder_version=”4.20.4″ _module_preset=”default” hover_enabled=”0″ global_colors_info=”{}” theme_builder_area=”post_content” sticky_enabled=”0″][\/et_pb_image][et_pb_text module_class=”text-with-dropcap” _builder_version=”4.20.4″ _module_preset=”default” hover_enabled=”0″ global_colors_info=”{}” theme_builder_area=”post_content” sticky_enabled=”0″]<\/p>\n I HAD THESE TWO extremely different recording experiences going,\u201d Springsteen told MOJO in 1999, revealing how at one point in his embarrassment of riches, he thought of releasing Nebraska<\/i> and Born In The USA<\/i> together as a double album \u2013 then thought better of it. <\/p>\n [\/et_pb_text][et_pb_text _builder_version=”4.20.4″ _module_preset=”default” hover_enabled=”0″ global_colors_info=”{}” theme_builder_area=”post_content” sticky_enabled=”0″]<\/p>\n \u201cThe tonality of the music was just too different, too oppositional,\u201d he said, expanding on that decision in his memoir. Nebraska<\/i> \u201chad been so funkily recorded\u201d that Springsteen considered putting it out in its original format \u2013 cassette \u2013 until Plotkin found the \u201cold mastering lathe\u201d at Atlantic. And there was no tour for Nebraska<\/i>, the first time the singer neglected to go out on the road behind a new album.<\/p>\n Instead, he went back to writing and wrestling with Born In The USA<\/i>, going through 80-100 songs (depending on the source) before hitting the final sequence. In 1998, he finally released one of his demo versions of that title track, including it on the rarities box set, Tracks<\/i>.<\/p>\n \u201cI had a lot of sorting out to do,\u201d Springsteen said, summing up that time to MOJO. \u201cWhen you get older, the price for not sorting through the issues that make up your emotional life rises.\u201d And, \u201cI was at a place where I could start to really feel that price,\u201d he added. \u201cThere are things that make sense of life for people: their friends, the work they do, your community, your relationship with your partner. What if you lose those things, then what are you left with?\u201d<\/p>\n There was always the redemption in music. \u201cRadio\u2019s jammed up with gospel stations \/ Lost souls callin\u2019 long distance salvation,\u201d Springsteen sang in Nebraska<\/i>\u2019s one straight-up rock\u2019n\u2019roll party, Open All Night, about a guy stuck on the late shift, burning rubber through \u201cNew Jersey in the mornin\u2019 like a lunar landscape\u201d to get home to his Wanda. \u201cHey Mr Deejay, woncha hear my last prayer \/ Hey ho rock\u2019n\u2019roll, deliver me from nowhere.\u201d<\/p>\n For Springsteen, that\u2019s exactly what happened next. <\/p>\n [\/et_pb_text][et_pb_divider color=”#111111″ module_class=”custom-divider” _builder_version=”4.20.4″ _module_preset=”default” custom_margin=”||0px||false|false” custom_padding=”||0px||false|false” global_colors_info=”{}” theme_builder_area=”post_content”][\/et_pb_divider][\/et_pb_column][\/et_pb_row][\/et_pb_section]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" NEBRASKA was a lo-fi fever dream populated by conflicted cops and serial killers, the lost and the lonely<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":2684,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_et_pb_use_builder":"on","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_lmt_disableupdate":"","_lmt_disable":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2673","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-mojo-presents"],"acf":[],"modified_by":"kschwarz","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/flatplanplus.io\/mojo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2673","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/flatplanplus.io\/mojo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/flatplanplus.io\/mojo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flatplanplus.io\/mojo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/13"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flatplanplus.io\/mojo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2673"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/flatplanplus.io\/mojo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2673\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2688,"href":"https:\/\/flatplanplus.io\/mojo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2673\/revisions\/2688"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flatplanplus.io\/mojo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2684"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/flatplanplus.io\/mojo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2673"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flatplanplus.io\/mojo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2673"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flatplanplus.io\/mojo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2673"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
<\/strong>Portrait: Frank Stefanko<\/strong><\/p>\n“Born In The USA came together in the second take. But then Springsteen hit a brick wall: the eerie force of the cassette tape in his pocket.”<\/h2>\n
“Bruce was holding up the tape and saying, \u2018There\u2019s just something about the atmosphere on this. Can\u2019t we just master off this?\u2019”<\/h2>\n
TOBY SCOTT<\/h3>\n