Deliver Me from Nowhere: The Making of Bruce Springsteen's Nebraska by Warren Zanes, 298 pgs.
The story of how this seminal work came to be is one for the ages. Fresh off The River tour in 1981, which garnered his first top ten hit for the song "Hungry Heart," Springsteen had a slew of new material to work out for his next record. He wasn't quite sure what it was going to sound like, but he knew he had something he wanted to say.
At the time, he was working his way through a deep depression, reviewing the trauma of his childhood and taking interest in stories about the darker side of Reagan's America, who had been newly elected President in 1981. Nebraska would become Springsteen's response to Reagan's optimist "Morning in America" messaging. The rocker took some cultural clues and blended them with his own influences: chiefly, the film Badlands by Terrence Malick and the short stories of Flannery O'Conner.
To record his demos, Springsteen rented an hold farmhouse in New Jersey and set-up a new TEAC 144 Portastudio--the first portable, multi-track mixer to use a standard cassette tape. Springsteen recorded his songs alone and sent the tape to his manager. The songs were dark, far darker than anything the artist had written at the time. When Springsteen got the band together to record the new material, the sound wasn't working--"nothing seemed to capture the spirit of the cassette recordings."
The artist tried to re-record them solo, in a nice studio with good equipment, but even then, the characters in the songs were getting lost. It wasn't until his manager suggested that, maybe he should just release the demo tape as is. Then the book pivots to the struggle to get the best possible sound signal from the cassette tape onto the vinyl record, which was another major headache and almost never happened. Ultimately, the critically acclaimed Nebraska would become one of Springsteen's most revered albums and cement his legacy as a true artist--to this day, he still cites it as the best thing he's ever done.
