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'I planned just to write some good songs, teach 'em to the band, go into the studio and record them. Springsteen's band would record what he had on the cassette, but bigger and bolder wasn't what he was looking for: 'It was a happy accident,' he said. 'I'm lucky I didn't lose it!' The Teac 144 4-track cassette deck on which Springsteen recorded the songs. 'I don't think I had a case,' he replied. 'I hope you had a plastic case on it, at least,' said Axelrod. On a broken-down boom box, Springsteen mixed the songs onto a cassette tape he carried around in his back pocket, for a few weeks. The music, Springsteen maintained, possessed a 'very stark, dark, lonely sound. Others profiled adults left out, or left behind. Springsteen said, ''Mansion on the Hill,' 'My Father's House,' 'Used Cars,' they're all written from kids' perspectives, children trying to make sense of the world that they were born into.' She said 'I'm sorry, son, but no one by that name I walked up the steps and stood on the porchĪ woman I didn't recognize came and spoke to me Some songs explored the confusion left from childhood, like 'My Father's House': Not only was it beautiful to look at, it came in handy!' The bedroom where Springsteen recorded 'Nebraska,' still with the original orange shag carpet. 'The orange shag carpet makes it really dead. One of rock's biggest stars sat in this bedroom, alone, and sang, getting exactly the sound he was looking for.Īnd the acoustics? 'Not bad,' Springsteen said. In a surge of creativity, he wrote 15 songs in a matter of weeks, and one January night in 1982, it was time to record, on a 4-track cassette machine. 'Yeah, I tried to locate where their humanity was, as best as I could,' Springsteen said. ''There's a meanness in this world.' That explains everything Starkweather's done,' said Axelrod. Well, sir, I guess there's just a meanness in this world I can't say that I'm sorry for the things that we doneĪt least for a little while, sir, me and her, we had us some fun …

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In a serial killer, Springsteen had found a muse: And it just sort of focused me on the feeling of what I wanted to write about.' And she was a lovely woman, and we talked for a half-hour or so. And amazingly enough she was still at the newspaper. He said, 'I actually called the reporter who had reported on that story in Nebraska. While he filled notebook after notebook ('It's funny, because I don't remember doing all this work!' he mused, leafing through his writings), the album didn't come together until late one night when he was channel surfing and stumbled across 'Badlands,' Terrence Malick's film about Charles Starkweather, whose murder spree in 1957 and '58 unfolded mainly in Nebraska. And he wanted to be freed of it.'įor Springsteen, liberation had always come through writing. He felt that his past was making his present complicated. 'Here's Bruce Springsteen making a record from a kind of bottom in his own life,' said Zanes. Springsteen's pain was rooted in a lonely childhood. Zanes' new book, 'Deliver Me from Nowhere,' offers a deep and moving examination of the making of 'Nebraska.' They come in the back door, they come up through a trap door, and stay with you in life.' 'You can either take it and transform it into something positive, or it can destroy you.'Īuthor Warren Zanes said, 'There are records, films, books that don't just come in the front door. 'So, I said, 'OK, the first thing I gotta do as soon as I get home is remind myself of who I am and where I came from.'Īt the fixed-up farmhouse he was renting, he would try to understand why his success left him so alienated.

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