Deliver Me from Nowhere: The Making of Bruce Springsteen's Nebraska

Product Information

Only a supreme conceptual optimist could turn a song about depression into a glitter ball-friendly hit single.

Even so, the prospect of a Springsteen tour stirred anticipation among longtime fans, and few deserve rock-elder-statesman status more. 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. One of the saddest and most touching quotes from the time is where Bruce reveals the fact that there is almost nothing in his life apart from his music. Fewer are the opportunities to hear oneself in the music, to follow the threads that tie the listener to it.

During this same period, the Cure’s leader, Robert Smith, made headlines by having Ticketmaster issue refunds for “service charges. But after fumbling at the gate, Springsteen should have found an elegant solution; almost any gesture at this point would improve on nothing.

In this intimate retelling of how Bruce Springsteen’s most introspective album came to be, musician Zanes ( Petty) unpacks the psyche, pathos, and music industry machinery that made it so surprising and stirring.

If Burke definitively proves one point over the course of the book, it’s that “Nebraska,” like the works of John Steinbeck, Flannery O’Connor, Martin Scorsese, Woody Guthrie, etc. two years later, but only after laying down an aesthetic marker that screamed through its whispers, as if to say, “Fame feels like a curse, and I have to confront this stuff first. The author draws on new interviews with key associates, but securing the participation of Springsteen himself greatly broadens the book’s emotional scope. He has now been pretty open about his battles with depression and he’s always seemed to be a man who struggles with the height of fame that he has risen to. Landau once proclaimed, in Boston’s Real Paper in 1974, that he “saw rock and roll[’s] future and its name is Bruce Springsteen,” and he has since served as both producer and manager.

Interviews with Bruce Springsteen, Jon Landau, Chuck Plotkin, and a number of recording artists influenced by this seminal release make this an insightful, compelling work. It’s an embarrassing karaoke set that mixes great material with Tonka-toy instrumentals for a mismatch of frame to subject. We also use them to help detect unauthorized access or activity that violate our terms of service, as well as to analyze site traffic and performance for our own site improvement efforts. This spooky image by David Michael Kennedy from the inner sleeve is the only photo of the artist on the album.As we continue to make our way into the Twenty-first Century, things have only gotten worse for lawbreakers. 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.

Quite differently, Nebraska came from the middle of that “overflow,” was not a thing “recollected in tranquillity. While building his devoted audience, Springsteen had cemented their loyalty by twining rock star privilege with mensch largesse. What he was making was something raw, personal, and dark — the tenor of those tracks “concerned me on a friendship level,” Springsteen’s manager Jon Landau told Zanes, who doesn’t shy away from Springsteen’s battle with depression and anxiety during that period. He gave heavy-handed nods to Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger, oversinging on The Ghost of Tom Joad (1995), Devils and Dust (2005), and We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions (2006). P. at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum and is currently the Executive Director of Steven Van Zandt's Rock and Roll Forever Foundation.

But how and why Springsteen unraveled those dark story-songs, and the sheer effort it took to release them in the form they were in, has never been as thoroughly and fascinatingly explored as Zanes does here. Years later,” Zanes adds, “it would seem Nebraska was the pulling back of the bow, and Born in the U. When he took the stage with “Badlands,” Springsteen lit up the audience with energies both fierce and fearsome, only suggested by the lead track on Darkness. Access to Bruce, his manager, ands lots of great stories make for a very interesting and highly recommended read.