After the double album The RiverThe Boss publishes Nebraska his most poignant, most stripped-down album. More than an album, a revolution: alone on guitar, Springsteen sings and declaims a portrait of rare violence of an America adrift devouring the dreams of its inhabitants.
Ten years have passed since the first recording efforts of Bruce Springsteen. Ten years spent forging a fiery and oh-so-expansive rock & roll sound. Ten years of forging very personal links with a loyal audience. To tell simple, understandable stories, with a sense of metaphor that is sober and yet so evocative. However, some stories are best told in the most bare terms. We are in 1982, at the advent of the big studios with oversized consoles and super-produced records. But Bruce, after having signed a double album which will propel him once again into the stratosphere and major stadium tours, arrives with an extremely personal project, probably one of his most daring records. Above all, he spectacularly shows his right to make the records he wants. Nebraska is certainly the most courageous of his then short discography – six discs. Risky from a commercial point of view – thereby alienating possible radio play – this collection of ten songs is also and above all a masterstroke, an inspired way to escape from this world of rock & roll with high financial stakes, this recording industry which demands that each new album be more grandiose than the previous one.
If we can rightly estimate that The Wild, Innocent & E Street Shuffle, released in 1973, constitutes the alpha and omega of the Springsteenian thing – the following developing, refining and deepening his songwriting as well as his arrangements, Nebraska remains a revolution: alone on guitar, Springsteen sings and declaims a portrait of rare violence of an America adrift devouring the dreams of its inhabitants. He paints this descriptive panorama with old brushes and rusty knives: acoustic guitars, harmonica, organ sometimes, even mandolin, all captured on a four-track cassette recorder. The vocabulary used is derived from folk music – going straight back to the songs of Woody Guthrie. The style is definitive, unwavering, provocative, desperate; the singing is honest and the music hard, determined and without embellishments.
