There was a time when I could play all the songs on this record by heart. Well, they ain’t to had to play, basic chords with not to complicated strumming, maybe a few of them picked in rather conventional style, but the fact that I could play the all says something about the record, doesn’t it. Maybe it just says that the songs were easy enough for me to learn to play the guitar with them, but there is more. Of course, it says that I liked the record a lot, otherwise this review wouldn’t be here. And yeah, I was a big Bruce-fan when I was younger (and still am). What it says most of all is, that the record is woven through by a feeling and atmosphere that made it very close to me. “Nebraska” might be the most intimate and most emotional record Bruce Springsteen ever records. It is a sparse, purely acoustic rendition of the fallacies and drama that everyday-lives implore on regular people. There is a lot of despair, of darkness and even brutality, which makes it also the darkest record Bruce Springsteen has ever recorded, maybe after “Darkness on the edge of town”(1978). “Nebraska” is where Springsteen retired into a small Motel in the middle of nowhere after the huge success of “The River” (1980), the following stadium-tours and the big break. The first thing you’ll notice musically is that there is no “E-Street-Band” adding their clamour of pianos, saxophones and arrangements that make even the dreariest sentiment stomachable as on “The River”. No, Springsteen allegedly recorded this in a small Motel in the nowhere-lands of the Midwest on a four-track all by himself. (actually it was recorded on a 4-track in New Jersey.) You can hear cars going by in the background. My copy is too worn out to listen to that, but musically “Nebraska” is not about subtleties. It is the conveyed atmosphere that is important.

Because this is where Springsteen got all his dark and evil demons out, to free himself from the wastelands in his soul, which made it possible for him to write his biggest hit-album “Born in the USA” (1984) two years later, which pushed him into the rock’n’roll-hall of fame forever. His following downfall into a caricature of himself and the late revival of himself as a songwriter and American voice with meaning is of no interest right here. What is obvious, is the fact, that “Nebraska” stands out in the work of Bruce Springsteen, so much that this record has an appeal to everyone who admits a liking to modern, country-music of the very sad, tragic and darker vein, e.g. Will Oldham, Walkabouts or even the Scud Mountain Boys. On “Nebraska” you will find all the sentiments, the horror-stories and the failed romance that makes the lyrics look as if they were inspired by some local, Midwestern tabloid. The heart of America, dark and rotten, and strangely fascinating. And the same way the daily stories in these tabloids form the fabric of everyday myths that are shared by a local community, the ten songs on “Nebraska” form a storybook of the Mid-Eighties, depression-ridden American working man’s life.

The record starts of with a tale that later on would become “Natural Born Killer” and a media-icon in its own right: the serial-killer-couple. The lyrics culminate in the third verse with “I can’t say that I am sorry, for the things that we done / at least for a little while sir, me and her had us some fun” and then again at the end with: “They wanted to know why I did, what I did, well sir, I guess there’s just a meanness in this world.” Remember, this is a personae speaking which is about to go to the electric chair for randomly shooting people on a killing spree with his darling. There is another man-runs-amok-song called “Johnny 99” about a man fired from his job at the factory and buggered by the banks until he gets up and shoots the night clerk. Defending himself at his trial he comes up with nothing more to show for in his life than: “Well your honour I do believe I’d be better off dead, and if you could kill a man for the thoughts that’s in his head, then … let ‘em shave off my hair and put me on that execution line.” Johnny Cash later on covered that song and if the arts-department of the Austrian public television would do a piece on it, they’d interpret that as an essay about the horrors of the death penalty, as they did on Nick Cave’s “Mercy Seat” and which is pure shite either way. (I had to bring that up, I am sorry.)

The other songs fall loosely into two categories: Songs about the situation of people right now in the present, who either are about to do something stupid, which will ruin their lives, but find no other way out of the situation life has put them into (“Atlantic City”) or just think about the dirty chips live has dealt them (“State Trooper”, “Open all night”). And then there are songs about the past, some about childhood memories (“Mansion on the hill”, “Used Cars”, “My Fathers house”) which aren’t any good or visibly show that if life deals you a bad start you will have to chew on that forever, or about the way families can run you down even if you are the good guy in the family (“Highway Patrolman”). Sean Penn made a movie of that last song, which is actually rather good and captures the broken down, rusty spirit of the song pretty well. What is remarkable about all these songs is the force of the storytelling, which draws you into the picture fast and hard, ties emotional bonds between narrator and listener and enlightens the scene with well-chosen details here and there. The characters are convincing and the scenes depicted are believable, which puts them somewhere between tales of the trials of modern workingman and mere scenery that might remind of photographic art of the industrial depression times. Sure, the sentiments are influenced by the time they were written a lot, but they are also emotionally ordinary enough to survive the transition to other decades and countries.

There is one more song: “Reason to believe” which wraps up the record in a superb fashion. The singer depicts more sad episodes in people's lifes, as broken love, the cycle of birth and death, broken marriages, but at the end of every verse the singer wonders how “at the end of every hard earned day, people find some reason to believe.” And this is the main question of the whole record: where does all the hope, the energy, the will come from, to live yet another day? People keep on pushing, keep on working, keep on providing, always swallowing the punches life deals them, taking more and more, and only a minority explode into a righteous burst of violence and despair. Where does it come from? Bruce Springsteen gives us an answer only indirectly, because through the darkness of the songs on “Nebraska” we can feel a glitter, a small glimmering of a better life somewhere up ahead the road (the metaphor of driving is well worn-out, especially in songs by Springsteen) and that is where we are  - hopefully – headed to, though we have no guarantees. There is no point in giving up, just as there might be no point in keeping on. But even if the chances are way bad, that is better than the nothingness that zero offers.  

Emily Pawlosky wrote an interesting piece on this record for university and she even cited this here review. Check it out here.