Nebraska (album)

Nebraska
Studio album by Bruce Springsteen
Released	September 30, 1982 (1982-09-30)
Recorded	Mostly January 3, 1982 at Springsteen's Colts Neck, New Jersey bedroom
Genre	Folk
Length	40:50
Label	Columbia
Producer	Bruce Springsteen
Bruce Springsteen chronology
The River (1980)The River1980 Nebraska (1982) Born in the U.S.A. (1984)Born in the U.S.A.1984
Singles from Nebraska
"Atlantic City" Released: 1982 (UK only) "Open All Night" Released: November 1982 (UK only)

Nebraska is the sixth studio album, and the first acoustic album by Bruce Springsteen. The album was released on September 30, 1982, by Columbia Records.

Sparsely-recorded on a cassette-tape Portastudio, the tracks on Nebraska were originally intended as demos of songs to be recorded with the E Street Band. However, Springsteen ultimately decided to release the demos himself. Nebraska remains one of the most highly regarded albums in his catalogue. The songs on Nebraska both deal with ordinary, blue collar characters who face a challenge or a turning point in their lives, but also outsiders, criminals and mass murderers, who have little hope for the future - or no future at all, as in the title track, where the main character is sentenced to death in the electric chair. Unlike his previous albums, very little salvation and grace is present within the songs. The album's uncompromising sound and mood, combined with its dark lyrical content has been described by a music critic as "one of the most challenging albums ever released by a major star on a major record label."

Background

Initially, Springsteen recorded demos for the album at his home with a 4-track cassette recorder. The demos were sparse, using only acoustic guitar, electric guitar (on "Open All Night"), harmonica, mandolin, glockenspiel, tambourine, organ, synthesizer (on "My Father's House") and Springsteen's voice. Springsteen then recorded the album in a studio with the E Street Band. However, he and the producers and engineers working with him felt that a raw, haunted folk essence present on the home tapes was lacking in the band treatments, and so they ultimately decided to release the demo version as the final album. Complications with mastering of the tapes ensued because of low recording volume, but the problem was overcome with sophisticated noise reduction techniques.

Springsteen fans have long speculated whether Springsteen's full-band recording of the album, nicknamed Electric Nebraska, will ever surface. In a 2006 interview, manager Jon Landau said it was unlikely and that "the right version of Nebraska came out". But in a 2010 interview with Rolling Stone, E Street Band drummer Max Weinberg praised the full band recording of the album as "killing." Other songs demoed during the Nebraska sessions include "Born in the U.S.A.", "Downbound Train", "Child Bride" (which later evolved into "Working on the Highway"), "Pink Cadillac", "The Big Payback", "Johnny Bye Bye", and "Losin' Kind".

"I was just doing songs for the next rock album, and I decided that what always took me so long in the studio was the writing. I would get in there, and I just wouldn't have the material written, or it wasn't written well enough, and so I'd record for a month, get a couple of things, go home write some more, record for another month — it wasn't very efficient. So this time, I got a little Teac four-track cassette machine, and I said, I'm gonna record these songs, and if they sound good with just me doin' 'em, then I'll teach 'em to the band. I could sing and play the guitar, and then I had two tracks to do somethin' else, like overdub a guitar or add a harmony. It was just gonna be a demo. Then I had a little Echoplex that I mixed through, and that was it. And that was the tape that became the record. It's amazing that it got there, 'cause I was carryin' that cassette around with me in my pocket without a case for a couple of week, just draggin' it around. Finally, we realized, "Uh-oh, that's the album." Technically, it was difficult to get it on a disc. The stuff was recorded so strangely, the needle would read a lot of distortion and wouldn't track in the wax. We almost had to release it as a cassette."

–Bruce Springsteen, recalling the early stages of the recording of the album, Rolling Stone Interview, December 1984

Themes

The album begins with "Nebraska", a first-person narrative based on the true story of 19-year-old spree killer Charles Starkweather and his 14-year-old girlfriend, Caril Ann Fugate, and ends with "Reason to Believe", a complex narrative that offers a small amount of hope to counterbalance the otherwise dark nature of the album. The remaining songs are largely of the same bleak tone, including the dark "State Trooper," influenced by Suicide's "Frankie Teardrop". Criminal behavior continues as a theme in the song "Highway Patrolman": even though the protagonist works for the law, he lets his brother escape after he has shot someone (this became the basis for the Sean Penn-directed film The Indian Runner). "Open All Night", a Chuck Berry-style lone guitar rave-up, does manage a dose of defiant, humming-towards-the-gallows exuberance.

Springsteen stated that the stories in this album were partly inspired by historian Howard Zinn's book A People's History of the United States. A music video was produced for the song "Atlantic City"; it features stark, black-and-white images of the city, which had not yet undergone its later economic transformation.

Critical reception

Professional ratings
Review scores
Source	Rating
AllMusic
Chicago Tribune
PopMatters	(favorable)
Q
Rolling Stone
The Rolling Stone Album Guide
The Village Voice	A−

In 1989, Nebraska was ranked 43rd on Rolling Stone magazine's list of the 100 greatest albums of the 1980s. That same year, Richard Williams wrote in Q magazine that "Nebraska would simply have been a vastly better record with the benefit of the E Street Band and a few months in the studio."

In 2003, Nebraska was ranked number 224 on Rolling Stone magazine's list of the 500 greatest albums of all time. Pitchfork Media listed it as the 60th greatest album of the 1980s. In 2006, Q placed the album at number 13 in its list of "40 Best Albums of the '80s". In 2012, Slant Magazine listed the album at number 57 on its list of "Best Albums of the 1980s".

Legacy

Being a highly influential album, the songs of Nebraska have been covered numerous times. Notably, country music icon Johnny Cash's 1983 album Johnny 99 featured versions of two of Springsteen's songs from Nebraska: "Johnny 99" and "Highway Patrolman". Cash also contributed to a widely praised tribute album, Badlands - A Tribute to Bruce Springsteen's Nebraska, which was released on the Sub Pop label in 2000 and produced by Jim Sampas. It featured covers of the Nebraska songs recorded in the stripped-down spirit of the original recordings by a wide-ranging group of artists including Hank Williams III, Los Lobos, Dar Williams, Deana Carter, Ani DiFranco, Son Volt, Ben Harper, Aimee Mann, and Michael Penn. Three additional tracks covered other Springsteen songs in the same vein: Johnny Cash's contribution was I'm On Fire, a track from Springsteen's best-selling album Born In The USA.

Alt-country singer Steve Earle covered State Trooper on his Live album in 1996 in addition to including a live recording of it on the 2002 reissue of his debut album Guitar Town, and also included a live version of "Nebraska" as the B-side of the "Copperhead Road" single sent to radio stations. Kelly Clarkson compared her effort to move away from mainstream to edgier and more personal music on her third studio album My December to Springsteen's Nebraska. The short stories in Deliver Me From Nowhere, a book written by Tennessee Jones published in 2005, were inspired by the themes of Nebraska. Minneapolis Celtic rock band Boiled in Lead covered "State Trooper" on its 1994 album Antler Dance. Minnesota indie-rock band Halloween, Alaska covered "State Trooper" on its 2004 self-titled debut album. American indie rock band The National performed a live cover of "Mansion on the Hill" in 2008 for the band's The Virginia EP.

In 2012, folk/Americana duo Shovels & Rope released a cover of "Johnny 99", and frequently played the song as the set closer on their North American tour that same year.

Track listing

All songs written and composed by Bruce Springsteen. 

Side one
No.	Title	Length
1.	"Nebraska"	4:32
2.	"Atlantic City"	4:00
3.	"Mansion on the Hill"	4:08
4.	"Johnny 99"	3:44
5.	"Highway Patrolman"	5:40
6.	"State Trooper"	3:17

Side two
No.	Title	Length
7.	"Used Cars"	3:11
8.	"Open All Night"	2:58
9.	"My Father's House"	5:07
10.	"Reason to Believe"	4:11

Personnel

• Bruce Springsteen – vocals, guitar, harmonica, mandolin, glockenspiel, tambourine, organ, synthesizer, production

Production

• Mike Batlin – recording engineer
• David Michael Kennedy – photography
• Dennis King - mastering
• Andrea Klein – design

Charts

Weekly charts

Chart	Position
Australian Kent Music Report	8
Canadian RPM Albums Chart	3
Dutch Albums Chart	7
French SNEP Albums Chart	18
Japanese Oricon LP Chart	10
New Zealand Albums Chart	3
Norwegian VG-lista Albums Chart	3
Swedish Albums Chart	2
UK Albums Chart	3
U.S. Billboard 200	3
West German Media Control Albums Chart	37

Year-end charts

Chart (1982)	Position
Canadian Albums Chart	32
UK Albums Chart	88

Certifications

Region	Certification	Sales/shipments
Australia (ARIA)	Platinum	70,000
Canada (Music Canada)	Gold	50,000
United Kingdom (BPI)	Gold	100,000
United States (RIAA)	Platinum	1,000,000
*sales figures based on certification alone ^shipments figures based on certification alone xunspecified figures based on certification alone

External links

• Nebraska (Adobe Flash) at Radio3Net (streamed copy where licensed)
• Album lyrics and audio samples