(Referring to the album – Nebraska) This is not about the charts. This is about Bruce Springsteen. And these are the songs that he wants to work on right now.
Let me tell you a little story when Bruce was little he had a hole in the floor of his bedroom – the floor that’s supposed to be solid, that you are supposed to be able to stand on – Bruce, he didn’t have that.
Bruce is a repairman and what he’s doing with this album is he is repairing that hole in his floor. He’s repairing that hole in himself. And once he’s done that, he’s going to repair the entire world.
I wrote in my last Monday News on the March segment about the upcoming biopic Springsteen movie – Deliver Me From Nowhere where the above quote appears. Springsteen and Jon Landau were both heavily involved in the project. The movie seems focused on one period of his life being the Nebraska record interspersed with childhood memories. In fact the trailer shows glimpses of how the recording process went down on Nebraska – just Springsteen, a guitar, and a harmonica.
‘It don’t need to be perfect. I want it to feel like I’m in the room by myself’
This album is argued by die hard fans as Springsteen’s most critically underrated. Like the title track here, it consists of very dark songs questioning society, and ends with “reason to believe”, a somewhat hopeful song that reflects on humanity’s determination to go on.
“I just hit some sort of personal wall that I didn’t even know was there. It was my first real major depression where I realized ‘Oh, I gotta do something about it.’”
The depression came in the aftermath of Springsteen’s professional high, as his chart-topping The River boasted what became his biggest hit at the time, “Hungry Heart.”
Springsteen tried to find inspiration from Johnny Cash by listening repeatedly to the singles and the albums Cash published for his first label, the Sun Records. Those records featured songs talking about the poors, the beaten down, and prisoners as is the case in today’s featured song – the title track.
Nebraska is sung as a first person narrative of Charles Starkweather, who along with his teenage girlfriend Caril Ann Fugate murdered 11 people over an eight-day period in 1958. Although the narrator describes the murders and his trial and impending execution, he sings in a flat, unemotional voice, which makes the events described seem all the more chilling.
Johnny Cash himself reacted enthusiastically to the record Nebraska, seeing shades of his younger self in this new, dark version of Springsteen, and in fact, he recorded two covers from Nebraska: Johnny 99 and Highway Patrolman.
“If I had to pick one album out and say ‘This is going to represent you 50 years from now,’ I’d pick Nebraska,”
– Springsteen told Jim Axelrod.
References:
1. See Bruce Springsteen Return to New Jersey Bedroom Where ‘Nebraska’ Was Born – Rolling Stone
2. Nebraska – Genius Lyrics
“The more I live, the more I learn. The more I learn, the more I realize, the less I know.”- Michel Legrand
Observation Blogger 
When I listened to “Nebraska” for the first time, it just didn’t do anything for me, and I didn’t understand why so many Springsteen fans thought it was his best album. It took me many years before I began warming to it. I now acknowledge it’s powerful. That said I doubt I will ever favor it over other Springsteen albums like “Born to Run”, “Darkness On the Edge of Town”, “The River”, “Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J.” or “Born In the U.S.A.”