Zanes interweaves these conversations with inquiries into the myriad cultural touchpoints, including Terrence Malick's Badlands and the short stories of Flannery O'Conner, that influenced Springsteen as he was writing the album's haunting songs.

You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. Joe Roberts, the cop who narrates “Highway Patrolman,” lets his degenerate brother Frankie drive out of state after committing a murder. edu/facpub/213/ "Since the 1970s, when mandatory sentencing swept the United States, sending more men and women to prison than ever before and for longer periods of time, life has been increasingly difficult for people who commit crime. It zeroes in on a period of both volatility and artistic breakthrough, when Springsteen made the record no one was asking for but that he was compelled to make.Interwoven among the entire narrative are Zanes’ conversations with Springsteen, throughout which the artist is frank, open, and generous in the details of both his personal and professional life — including an acknowledgement that “Nebraska” was his best work to that time, and “still may be. He has worked on films including Twenty Feet from Stardom and Martin Scorsese's George Harrison: Living in the Material World and his writing has appeared in The Oxford American, Rolling Stone, and the Los Angeles Times.

There was a rainy night in Long Branch, New Jersey, 2009, when police picked up Dylan in a neighborhood close to where Springsteen wrote most if not all of the Born to Run album.

In Zanes’s framing, a steadfast rock star forces his record label to swallow a bleak acoustic downer before committing to the big time. Zanes takes us with him into Springsteen’s New Jersey home, just a few miles from the house where Nebraska was made and not much further from his childhood home in Freehold, host to the trauma that seeded Nebraska’s desperate core. Just voice, guitar, harmonica and organ, recorded on an early home studio system, reveal an artist trying to reclaim his narrative after the inevitable hijackings of fame.

The natural follow-up to Springsteen's hugely successful album The River should have been the hit-packed Born in the U. The natural follow-up to Springsteen’s hugely successful album The River should have been the hit-packed Born in the U.

The fascinating story behind the making of Bruce Springsteen’s most surprising album, Nebraska, revealing its pivotal role in Springsteen’s career. We had listened to Darkness on the Edge of Town, his newest album, intently for a couple of weeks, and had read future biographer Dave Marsh’s rave review in Rolling Stone. And there is also this 52 page essay Portraits of Criminals on Bruce Springsteen's Nebraska: The Enigmatic Criminal, the Sympathetic Criminal, and the Criminal as Brother, available as a free download https://digitalcommons. There’s a moment in the history of popular music that has, for four decades, stood as one of the greatest examples of an artist choosing to leave a recording unfixed, unfinished, imperfect: Bruce Springsteen’s sixth album, “Nebraska. He’d obviously thought deeply about backup singers, the film’s subject, and about the emotional layer those voices added to so many great recordings.

Landau puts it like this to Zanes: “It’s like he had his Star Wars and his art movie in his hand at the same moment. Years later,” Zanes adds, “it would seem Nebraska was the pulling back of the bow, and Born in the U. I guess the only question that wasn’t answered for me in this book is why some of the songs from this session were never used. It’s a measure of our cultural progress that we now hear this as material from a suffering patient, and not just a voice trapped by fate.These quirks send anal retentive purveyors of production perfection screaming into the night, but credit Springsteen for sticking to his artistic convictions and recognizing what Neil Young did when he released the harrowing and gloriously flawed Tonight’s the Night.