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Deliver Me from Nowhere: The Making of Bruce Springsteen's Nebraska
The fascinating story behind the making of Bruce Springsteen's most surprising album, Nebraska, revealing its pivotal role in Springsteen's career
Without Nebraska, Bruce Springsteen might not be who he is today. The natural follow-up to Springsteen's hugely successful album The River should have been the hit-packed Born in the U.S.A. But instead, in 1982, he came out with an album consisting of a series of dark songs he had recorded by himself, for himself. But more than forty years later, Nebraska is arguably Springsteen's most important record-the lasting clue to understanding not just his career as an artist and the vision behind it, but also the man himself.
Nebraska is rough and unfinished, recorded on cassette tape with a simple four-track recorder by Springsteen, alone in his bedroom, just as the digital future was announcing itself. And yet Springsteen now considers it his best album. Nebraska expressed a turmoil that was reflective of the mood of the country, but it 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.
Warren Zanes spoke to many people involved with making Nebraska, including Bruce Springsteen himself. He also interviewed more than a dozen celebrated artists and musical insiders, from Rosanne Cash to Steven Van Zandt, about their reactions to the album. Zanes interweaves these conversations with inquiries into the myriad cultural touchpoints, including Terrence Malick's Badlands and the short stories of Flannery O'Conner, that influenced Springsteen as he was writing the album's haunting songs. The result is a textured and revelatory account of not only a crucial moment in the career of an icon but also a record that upended all expectations and predicted a home-recording revolution.
Without Nebraska, Bruce Springsteen might not be who he is today. The natural follow-up to Springsteen's hugely successful album The River should have been the hit-packed Born in the U.S.A. But instead, in 1982, he came out with an album consisting of a series of dark songs he had recorded by himself, for himself. But more than forty years later, Nebraska is arguably Springsteen's most important record-the lasting clue to understanding not just his career as an artist and the vision behind it, but also the man himself.
Nebraska is rough and unfinished, recorded on cassette tape with a simple four-track recorder by Springsteen, alone in his bedroom, just as the digital future was announcing itself. And yet Springsteen now considers it his best album. Nebraska expressed a turmoil that was reflective of the mood of the country, but it 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.
Warren Zanes spoke to many people involved with making Nebraska, including Bruce Springsteen himself. He also interviewed more than a dozen celebrated artists and musical insiders, from Rosanne Cash to Steven Van Zandt, about their reactions to the album. Zanes interweaves these conversations with inquiries into the myriad cultural touchpoints, including Terrence Malick's Badlands and the short stories of Flannery O'Conner, that influenced Springsteen as he was writing the album's haunting songs. The result is a textured and revelatory account of not only a crucial moment in the career of an icon but also a record that upended all expectations and predicted a home-recording revolution.
Editorial Reviews
"Warren Zanes is in possession of a genuine, often astonishing writerly gift. This book is about Bruce Springsteen's weird, gothic, heartbroken 1982 left turn, Nebraska, which is not just a startling swerve in the career of a great American artist or a pivotal yet neglected transitional moment in the history of recorded music, but the question Springsteen asked himself forty years ago: What do you do when you begin to understand that the things you have loved most have begun to do you harm? This is some of Zanes's best writing ever, which is saying a lot."-Michael Chabon, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay
"Zanes has emerged from the wilderness of Nebraska with one of the greatest books about the creative process ever written. By focusing on Springsteen's dark masterpiece and the soil it emerged from, Zanes elevates it to near mythic stature. Deliver Me from Nowhere is profoundly felt, deeply understood, and (as it should be) full of joy and abandon-with a hint of menace."-Nick Flynn, author of Another Bullshit Night in Suck City
"This book, more than any other, reveals the hidden corners of Bruce Springsteen's creative world. It zeroes in on a period of both volatility and artistic breakthrough, when Springsteen made the record no one was asking for but that he was compelled to make. Warren Zanes, one of our very finest music writers, always comes from the place of the music and its maker. No one else could have told this story."-Judd Apatow
"You can waste your access by protecting your subject or trying to get too pretty. Warren Zanes does neither. He honors the access he gets to all of his central characters. If you're a writer, his gift will make you jealous. But not jealous enough to stop reading. This is the Springsteen book we've been waiting for."-Geoff Edgers, national arts reporter for The Washington Post and author of Walk This Way: Run-DMC, Aerosmith, and the Song that Changed American Music Forever
"Zanes has emerged from the wilderness of Nebraska with one of the greatest books about the creative process ever written. By focusing on Springsteen's dark masterpiece and the soil it emerged from, Zanes elevates it to near mythic stature. Deliver Me from Nowhere is profoundly felt, deeply understood, and (as it should be) full of joy and abandon-with a hint of menace."-Nick Flynn, author of Another Bullshit Night in Suck City
"This book, more than any other, reveals the hidden corners of Bruce Springsteen's creative world. It zeroes in on a period of both volatility and artistic breakthrough, when Springsteen made the record no one was asking for but that he was compelled to make. Warren Zanes, one of our very finest music writers, always comes from the place of the music and its maker. No one else could have told this story."-Judd Apatow
"You can waste your access by protecting your subject or trying to get too pretty. Warren Zanes does neither. He honors the access he gets to all of his central characters. If you're a writer, his gift will make you jealous. But not jealous enough to stop reading. This is the Springsteen book we've been waiting for."-Geoff Edgers, national arts reporter for The Washington Post and author of Walk This Way: Run-DMC, Aerosmith, and the Song that Changed American Music Forever
Short Excerpt Teaser
Chapter One
The First Question
Photography has something to do with resurrection. -Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida
In the spring of 2021, Bruce Springsteen invited me to spend some time with him in Colts Neck, New Jersey, so that we could talk about Nebraska. When I arrived, he walked out to my car to meet me. When it was all over, he walked me back out. Everything was hand delivered. I was wishing I'd parked three miles away. I'd grown up listening to the guy's records. I had a lot of questions, not all of which he should have to bother with.
Springsteen has lived with the joy and burden of people wanting his time. The intimacy of the music brings something out in people. He's probably had to scrape off hundreds of us just to stay on schedule. But that day I was his guest, and he was as good a host as I could ask for. He got me water to drink and then asked if I needed more. Later in the afternoon he wondered if coffee was a good idea. I was at the family house and-as I think we both understood-his responsibility. Any mess I made he'd have to clean up.
I wanted to know where Nebraska came from, what it led to. It sat between two of Springsteen's most celebrated recordings, in its own quiet and turmoil. He described it to me as "an accident start to finish" but also as the album that "still might be [his] best." The recording came from a place and a time in which Springsteen was facing troubles in his life, troubles that had no name as of yet. Wordsworth defines poetry as "the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings . . . recollected in tranquillity." Quite differently, Nebraska came from the middle of that "overflow," was not a thing "recollected in tranquillity." It came from the heart of trouble and led to still more, its stark character the lasting reward.
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. Springsteen's manager, Jon Landau, recalled for me, over several afternoons at his Westchester home, the way in which Nebraska arrived. Chuck Plotkin, among Springsteen's producers and a key player in the last stages of Nebraska's creation, would talk about the anxious labor of trying to make the album conform to industry standards. But Springsteen knew the most by far, because it came from his bedroom.
While we talked that day in Colts Neck, Patti Scialfa was recording next door. There were a few others around, but everyone left us alone. Patti was in the process of turning a song into a recording. For all the talk of the hours, the sweat, and the persistence involved in making records, it's worth remembering that the process is also among the highest forms of pleasure, particularly when you're watching your own song or one you love turn into the recording you feel it's meant to be . . . and it happens without complication. Any song could become a thousand different records, but sometimes the recording studio is a place of pure lightness because a song is becoming just the recording it should be. That afternoon in Colts Neck, you got the sense that things were going well in the studio next door.
But I was with Springsteen in another room, doing something very different. On one level, I was probing, asking about a time in his life that wasn't easy. Given the way Springsteen has interviewed throughout his career, it shouldn't have come as a surprise that he seemed to hold back nothing. Where he had no answer or a question of his own, he didn't pretend all knowingness. Some combination of an investment in the truth and what seemed genuine wonder made him an unguarded collaborator.
I'd been out to the Colts Neck house once before, on that occasion in my capacity as consulting producer on the documentary Twenty Feet from Stardom. The director, Morgan Neville, was conducting the interview that day and had a few pages of good questions. But I always remembered that Springsteen passed on the first of those questions, which surprised me. As a question it was a good opener, appropriate, well delivered. But Springsteen responded by saying something along the lines of "What else you got?"
Whether it was intended to or...
The First Question
Photography has something to do with resurrection. -Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida
In the spring of 2021, Bruce Springsteen invited me to spend some time with him in Colts Neck, New Jersey, so that we could talk about Nebraska. When I arrived, he walked out to my car to meet me. When it was all over, he walked me back out. Everything was hand delivered. I was wishing I'd parked three miles away. I'd grown up listening to the guy's records. I had a lot of questions, not all of which he should have to bother with.
Springsteen has lived with the joy and burden of people wanting his time. The intimacy of the music brings something out in people. He's probably had to scrape off hundreds of us just to stay on schedule. But that day I was his guest, and he was as good a host as I could ask for. He got me water to drink and then asked if I needed more. Later in the afternoon he wondered if coffee was a good idea. I was at the family house and-as I think we both understood-his responsibility. Any mess I made he'd have to clean up.
I wanted to know where Nebraska came from, what it led to. It sat between two of Springsteen's most celebrated recordings, in its own quiet and turmoil. He described it to me as "an accident start to finish" but also as the album that "still might be [his] best." The recording came from a place and a time in which Springsteen was facing troubles in his life, troubles that had no name as of yet. Wordsworth defines poetry as "the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings . . . recollected in tranquillity." Quite differently, Nebraska came from the middle of that "overflow," was not a thing "recollected in tranquillity." It came from the heart of trouble and led to still more, its stark character the lasting reward.
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. Springsteen's manager, Jon Landau, recalled for me, over several afternoons at his Westchester home, the way in which Nebraska arrived. Chuck Plotkin, among Springsteen's producers and a key player in the last stages of Nebraska's creation, would talk about the anxious labor of trying to make the album conform to industry standards. But Springsteen knew the most by far, because it came from his bedroom.
While we talked that day in Colts Neck, Patti Scialfa was recording next door. There were a few others around, but everyone left us alone. Patti was in the process of turning a song into a recording. For all the talk of the hours, the sweat, and the persistence involved in making records, it's worth remembering that the process is also among the highest forms of pleasure, particularly when you're watching your own song or one you love turn into the recording you feel it's meant to be . . . and it happens without complication. Any song could become a thousand different records, but sometimes the recording studio is a place of pure lightness because a song is becoming just the recording it should be. That afternoon in Colts Neck, you got the sense that things were going well in the studio next door.
But I was with Springsteen in another room, doing something very different. On one level, I was probing, asking about a time in his life that wasn't easy. Given the way Springsteen has interviewed throughout his career, it shouldn't have come as a surprise that he seemed to hold back nothing. Where he had no answer or a question of his own, he didn't pretend all knowingness. Some combination of an investment in the truth and what seemed genuine wonder made him an unguarded collaborator.
I'd been out to the Colts Neck house once before, on that occasion in my capacity as consulting producer on the documentary Twenty Feet from Stardom. The director, Morgan Neville, was conducting the interview that day and had a few pages of good questions. But I always remembered that Springsteen passed on the first of those questions, which surprised me. As a question it was a good opener, appropriate, well delivered. But Springsteen responded by saying something along the lines of "What else you got?"
Whether it was intended to or...
