If there are Bruce Springsteen albums that need no introduction, like Born To Run, then there are some that definitely need a book to explain their genesis. The first of these in the Boss’ 21-studio-album timeline is Nebraska. Released in 1982, two years after Springsteen’s first chart-topper The River, Nebraska is the album no-one wanted Bruce to make: stripped-back demos that never made it to the E Street band rehearsal room form the album’s ten tracks. 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.
What Warren Zanes’ book does so well is to put this album into the context described above and to make sense of it within the wider story of American society. With interviews with the man himself, many of the LP’s other main movers, and a steely sharp focus, the author takes us into the monochrome world of an album that birthed a home studio revolution and created an unlikely acoustic pitstop on the way to superstardom (with Born In The USA) years before MTV Unplugged made acoustic rock de rigueur.
Punk rock, lo-fi, indie and introspection: Deliver Me From Nowhere finds the place where all these things collide, in Nebraska.
Deliver Me From Nowhere: The Making Of Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska, Warren Zanes (Crown)
Price: £18.99. Info: here
words JOHN-PAUL DAVIES
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