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A
Go beyond the verses and achieve a deeper understanding of Scripture with the Rebind Study Bible App. An audio experience of the Bible interwoven with expert commentary. The Rebind Study Bible App reads Scripture to you, enriching your comprehension with insights from the world renowned New International commentary on the Old and the New Testament in an accessible podcast episode format.
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B
Be not therefore anxious for the morrow. Matthew chapter 6.
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C
Each day will have its troubles, but by God's grace they can be survived.
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A
Use the Rebind Study Bible App's chat function to ask questions and get answers in real time. That's thought provoking discussion and analysis rooted in decades of research and wisdom from more than 40 scholars at your fingertips. The Rebind Study Bible App is a new way to experience the Bible with enhanced depth, at your own pace in the moments you have. Search the Apple App Store for Rebind Study Bible or go to rebind app.com newbooks network for a free seven day trial. Hello everybody, this is Marshall Po. I'm the founder and editor of the New Books Network and if you're listening to this, you know that the NBN is the largest academic podcast network in the world. We reach a worldwide audience of 2 million people. You may have a podcast or you may be thinking about starting a podcast. As you probably know, there are challenges basically of two kinds. One is technical. There are things you have to know in order to get your podcast produced and distributed. And the second is, and this is the biggest problem, you need to get an audience. Building an audience in podcasting is the hardest thing to do today. With this in mind, we at the NBM have started a service called NBN Productions. What we do is help you create a podcast, produce your podcast, distribute your podcast, and we host your podcast. Most importantly, what we do is we distribute your podcast to the NBN audience. We've done this many times with many academic podcasts and we would like to help you. If you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast, please contact us. Just go to the front page of the New Books Network and you will see a link to NBN Production. Click that, fill out the form and we can talk. Welcome to the New Books Network.
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C
I mean, I always love talking and thinking about this album, but it's always exciting to introduce somebody to something and you do this with me all the time. Introduce somebody to something that you really means a lot to you and just kind of see what their reactions are.
- [02:20]
B
I'm Professor Stephen Dyson and I'm Professor Jeff Dudas. And we have two political science professors who are here today to talk about Bruce Springsteen's Nebraska. Of course, the kind of news hook is that Nebraska 82, the specialist expanded edition, has just been released along with Deliver Me From Nowhere. That's the name of the movie, right? Yes, the movie starring Jeremy Allen White as Bruce Springsteen. But I think we also want to touch on Springsteen kind of more broadly. And we've got sort of an interesting difference in experience with Springsteen between us. We've got a kind of expert and novice vibe going on. I had never heard of Nebraska, literally had never heard of Nebraska until a couple of weeks ago where you said, I mean, I've heard of the state, but not, not the album until a couple of weeks ago where you said, you know, this is coming out, you should do a pod on it. So. So I've. This is almost like a react to or not first time listening. You know, I've listened a few times, but I still have very neophyte views on this album, whereas you're a real sort of expert in springtime.
- [03:17]
C
I first heard this album when I was 18 years old, which would have been still 1860, still about a decade after it was actually released. But I have been listening to this album for the better part of three decades by this point. So it's. It is going to be very interesting to kind of do our temperature checks, I think, on where we stand on the album.
- [03:39]
B
Yeah. So I think what we want to do is to, you know, of course it's important to talk about the. The kind of box set as a box set and the extra stuff that's. That's in there. But certainly from my standpoint, I'm so kind of new to and overwhelmed by the original album. The most, most of the thoughts I have are on that. That original album. But maybe we should actually just get into temperature check and just, just start there. Yeah. Do you want to. I mean, your temperature has been percolating for. For a long time on this topic.
- [04:05]
C
I first heard this album. I bought it as a used cassette tape. So that gives a little bit of.
- [04:11]
B
Did it have a case?
- [04:12]
C
It had a case.
- [04:13]
B
Okay. Because famously, I mean, this was in the movie. We should say before we go further, you didn't watch the movie because you don't like music, biopics and all the rest of it. I did go and watch the movie on my own because I thought, what's the easiest way. For me, the context and the mythos of this album is probably going to see A dramatization of what is supposed to be a fairly factual book. Right. And anyway, the big thing is Bruce and then the producer are kind of walking around with this tape that doesn't even have a case, and they present it to the record company and there's no case.
- [04:41]
C
Yeah. Bruce famously carries it in the back of his jeans pocket for weeks on end. Apparently, the version that I bought did have a case.
- [04:48]
B
Okay.
- [04:49]
C
But the thing that I most remember about that particular cassette tape is that, as would sometimes happen with cassette tapes, the little ribbon would come detached from the spool. And on this. On this version of Nebraska, it would happen after the third song, Mansion on the Hill. So every time the Mansion on the Hill was over, I'd have to take the cassette out, fish it out of the player, get the pencil out, respool the tape, and put it back in again. And so it was a real commitment, right, in a lot of ways to get through this album. But I just remember those first several listens. It sounds much better now.
- [05:29]
A
Right.
- [05:29]
C
They've been able to remaster it digitally to the best that they can get it. And it still sounds, I think, very spooky and kind of ethereal. But that first transfer that oppos onto cassette tape, it was rough. I mean, it really sounded like it was something that was recorded in the 1920s or early 1930s with the most rudimentary of recording equipment. And it had a kind of arresting vibe about it that was out of place with what I, at that point, knew about Springsteen, which was mostly the big radio hits from Born in the usa But Nebraska was the set of songs that really got me going deep into the rabbit hole.
- [06:15]
B
Okay, so you experienced Nebraska, not. Yes, you said, a decade after its release. So the order at which you came to it was you had an image of Springsteen, which post dates Nebraska. So you didn't experience it temporally. From the river to the river was the album before the album before, from the river to Nebraska as it would have been experienced in real time.
- [06:36]
C
Nebraska is really my first. It's really the first Springsteen album that I listen to.
- [06:40]
B
Yeah.
- [06:41]
C
And as I say it, it was sort of. It graded against the popular image that I had of Springsteen, which is, you know, this. Which is not entirely incorrect. This kind of anthemic stadium rocker that he had become in the mid-1980s. But Nebraska convinced me that this was a. There was a lot of depth and there was a series. This was a serious musician. And, you know, when you're 18 or 19 and you're. You're kind of desperately trying to figure out how to make sense of young adulthood. And for me, we've talked about this before. Music was kind of the essential thing that I was going to. To run across an album like Nebraska that was both inviting in a lot of ways, but also alienating and mysterious and difficult and. And requires some effort to get into and live with. Finding that text was really kind of eye opening to me. And so I was enchanted with it almost from the beginning. And then I have continued right on since then. So I. I was. Have been really excited about the. As you say, I don't care about the biopic, and I'm very unlikely to watch it. But the new box set I have been really enchanted by. And not only because it contains the fabled electric Nebraska recordings, which we might touch on at some point, but just because to me, it's a document that stands. Nebraska, that stands alone in Springsteen's oeuvre as containing a set of songs that are, I think, without peer, certainly in his songbook. And I think there's a case to be made that it's some of the very finest of American popular songwriting of the 20th century. So I'm always really excited to get back into it.
- [08:36]
B
Yeah, there's one point I just wanted to pick you up on that you mentioned there, which sort of bothered me. Which was the wisdom or the point of doing a remaster?
- [08:46]
C
Right.
- [08:47]
B
Because the whole thing before I started listening to it, I kind of looked into what it was and read about and everything. And the whole point of the original album is this diy, you know, home kind of lo fi recording setup. And it's dramatized in the movie at one point that the thing they're recording into, the kind of end point, that they're getting the songs down, there is a guy there helping him set the stuff up, and he says, you know, Bruce, this tape record is kind of beat up. And Bruce says, like, yeah, we dropped it in a lake, or, you know, and then it start. Just started working. And he's like, yeah, but it's running at the wrong speed. And Bruce is like, sounds right to me. And that's it. So given the uniqueness of that and that it's all supposed to be, you know, there's stuff on there that couldn't be fixed, fixed in post. And Bruce was like, that's the point. What then is the wisdom of going through a digital remastery process?
- [09:36]
C
I think the remaster is simply to clean up the little bits that could be cleaned up. My understanding is that because of the condition of the original tape, there's really not a whole lot that can be done with it. It can be made a bit louder. Maybe they can run it through some compression to kind of clean up a little bit. And maybe there's a little bit of separation on some of the. The very spare instrumentation that occurs on these songs that can be brought to the fore a little bit more. I'm okay with the remasters, because the remasters, all they really feel like they're doing is boosting the volume a little bit.
- [10:11]
B
Okay.
- [10:12]
C
It doesn't feel like it has cleaned up to me any of the harsh edges or the bespoke edges of the.
- [10:17]
B
Original record, which, in some sense is this kind of glorious. It. It. It therefore occupies the piece of physical media or a piece of media that. This almost unique place in our contemporary culture in that it's something that cannot be enhanced by AI. Right, right. Like it's. I mean, you know, I'm sure there's stuff you could do to change it, but it would be noticeable because it has such a. Such a place in the memory of.
- [10:41]
C
Yeah.
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B
Of. Of people who've listened to it for a long time that. That using the tools that everyone uses on audio, now that we believe it or not use, even on our own audio, you know, it's just not possible to create the artificial simulacrum. You actually need to remain faithful to the physical object from the past, which is almost unique in contemporary audio culture.
- [11:06]
C
Yeah, I think that's right. That's. My understanding is because the original recording was so rudimentary and because it deteriorated so much before it even left the original cassette tape. It was quite the feat of engineering, apparently, to simply get it off of the original cassette tape and onto vinyl. So they weren't even able to move it. My understanding is onto what then would have been industry standard. Moving it on to reel, to reel, and then from the real to reel. Having the vinyl cut, it had to go straight to the vinyl. And so that introduces a whole new set of impurities. Right. So it's possible maybe to see the remaster as sort of. Maybe even more accurate to the original recording because it has removed the sort of whatever, the impurities that occurred as a result of transferring it to vinyl.
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B
Yeah.
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C
So, yeah.
- [11:55]
B
That's amazing. I mean, you get the sense of, like, archeologists with this sort of ancient artifact that if you. If you just, like, use the brush or the knife a little bit wrong, the whole thing would crumble.
- [12:03]
C
And it sounds ancient.
- [12:04]
B
Yes, right.
- [12:05]
C
The songs sound ancient. And they kind of will maybe talk more about this when we get more into the songs, but they. To me, the songs sound like they've kind of floated in from nowhere and then they're there for a while and then they kind of disappear back into the ether and almost as though they're, you know, you're kind of working through the old radio dial, trying to find a transmission, which is, you know, referenced a lot in these songs, trying to find a transmission. And it, you know, for a couple of minutes you've got a clarity and then you lose the transmission and it goes away. And that. There's a kind of timelessness in that way to these songs into this recording, but there's. There's a kind of ancient vibe to these things. And what amazes me is that after 43 years, I mean, in a lot of ways, these songs are highly contemporary to the moment in which they were written and produced. But listening back, as I have over the years, none of the songs feel dated to me. The topics don't feel dated, the descriptions of people don't feel dated. None of it feels anachronistic. It just feels ancient. Yeah, right. Yeah, but, I mean, those are my sort of temper checks. What is your temperature check? I mean, you. I know that you know the song Dancing in the Dark and Born in the usa, but what else did you know? Anything else?
- [13:25]
B
Nothing. And it's. I mean, Springsteen is exactly. My image of. Bruce Springsteen is exactly the kind of artist that I would avoid like the plague. As you know, I have this sort of tragically narrow scope of music that I will allow into my realm as being legitimate artists.
- [13:41]
C
Don't be too hard on yourself. You're welcome. Willing to listen to music that's both from Manchester and Liverpool.
- [13:46]
B
Yes. Yeah, exactly. Music from Manchester or Liverpool, you know, across a huge range of human history, encompassing at least sort of 10 years in the 1980s and the 1990s. And anything outside of that, you know, I've just not really. Very rarely have engaged. Have engaged with. And of course, there was an eth. You know, because I like kind of indie guitar music from. From Britain in the 80s and 90s. And the ethos surrounding that was anything that got too big was. Was just regarded as inherently sort of corporate and a sellout and. And overly produced. Hugely ironic, given what Nebraska actually is. So I would have grouped up until a couple of weeks ago, Bruce Springsteen in that quote, unquote, great pantheon of American artists. Although the first one I can think of is Canadian, like Celine Dion. Do you know What I mean, like middle of the road and you two. Although they're Irish, I haven't actually come up with a. With another American artist, Taylor Swift, you know, things that I would inherently be suspicious of because they're too big. And so that's the image I had going in. And you're expecting kind of synthy, Born in the USA kind of stadium anthems. And of course it's nothing, nothing like that. So that kind of hits you. Hits you like a train. The other thing I was expecting, because, you know, I started looking into Nebraska where you said, when you said you wanted to talk about it, and you're told it's this very dark, difficult, lo fi, stripped down album is. I'm expecting an album of sludge and of non melodic sludge.
- [15:11]
C
Yeah.
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B
And that couldn't be further from the truth. I mean, the most striking thing to me is how melodic these songs are. And the melodies of almost every song are kind of in my head, like I feel like I could reproduce if you named the song off the album. I couldn't. Can't remember all the words, but I can remember the melody, which is the sign of which you would much more associate with someone like Taylor Swift who's trying to write like pop bangers with every song. And so that I thought was really interesting. And so I really like that. I really obviously liked it, you know, the, the depth of the, the lyrics. A win for me, of course, with Nebraska is, you know, I was aware of the Terrence Malick film and I rewatched that in preparation even before I listened to. Yeah, yeah, even before I listened to Nebraska, I rewatched the film, which I think was smart. Yeah. Because that's what, that's what Springsteen did when he wrote the damn thing. And then the, the, the final thing I'll say by way of preamble is one thing that happens when you have a very narrow musical education like me is you encounter the echoes of something and the people who are deeply influenced by it and you assume that they're originals or you don't quite fully understand how they've themselves integrated influences. And as you know, I like Craig Finn a lot and I like the Hold Steady. And so I'm listening to something like Atlantic City and I'm like in topic and in storytelling and even in phrasing, this sounds like a Craig Finn song to me. And of course, so you Google it and it's Craig Finn, massive Springsteen fan, you know, so that's another thing that you know. So you get the echo which is Craig Finn. And he has other influences, of course. And it's very useful to be shown by an older, wiser thing, you know, old Ben Kenobi to a Luke Skywalker.
- [16:55]
C
Is this on older?
- [16:57]
B
Well, I said wiser as well. To be educated a little bit in what my life in the background of some things that I was previously familiar with.
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C
Yeah.
- [17:05]
B
So that's kind of how I came into it.
- [17:07]
C
Yeah. I mean, I think that let's. Let's spend some time talking about the kind of the. The national context.
- [17:13]
B
Yeah.
- [17:13]
C
This album appears because it is, on one hand, it's an intensely small album. These songs are deeply detailed. Right. And they. Almost every single song, if not every single one of them, hangs its narrative on a. A particular protagonist or maybe a couple of protagonists living very unique and particular specific lives. But it's one of the. I think the lasting emphases of this album is that it is in a certain way a product of its time. Right. It is an album that is written in 1981, is. Appears in 1982. This is the first couple of years of the Ronald Reagan administration. It is. It marks really the sort of the historic and symbolic end or the beginning of the end maybe of the kind of post war New Deal coalition in American politics. It. It hits at a time in which you've got the United States in significant conditions of economic peril. Inflate. This is still the era of stagflation, Right. And this is an album that is full of. Of socially and economically isolated and precarious individuals. And it is accurate to the national context in which it was produced. This is also an album that appears, and we get some references here, not only in the songs that did make Nebraska, but in the sort of raft of other songs that he wrote famously as a part of the Nebraska. Not even to call them sessions, but the Nebraska writing period. We also have lots of references or at least occasional references to the condition of the United States in the post Vietnam era and in particular the condition of Vietnam veterans. Right. Who have come back. We see it most obviously in the Nebraska album in the song Highway Patrolman, which is the song about the two brothers, Right. The sheriff and his sort of wayward brother who has done a stint in Vietnam. But it's also, of course, this is the story of Born in the USA itself, which is a song that was originally written as a part of this. There are other songs from this era as well that are very clearly sort of post Vietnam era songs. Springsteen is writing these at the same time that Sylvester Stallone is doing First Blood.
- [19:42]
B
So I thought about this. I don't mean to interrupt your flow, but I literally saw a video about this this morning and, and I really thought of this analog between Nebraska and. And First Blood.
- [19:51]
A
Yeah.
- [19:52]
B
Because the video was all about how First Blood, when it was shot, Stallone hated it at the end of it and thought, this is such an awful movie, let's just burn it. And what had happened was it was. They'd shot way more than they needed for the movie and there was way more of, like, the fighting and the RA and the, you know, the kind of combat type stuff. And Stallone said, well, what if we actually cut out almost all my dialogue and we in the cut, make it this movie about this wounded Vietnam vet who's unable to reintegrate into an American that's now a stranger to him and he's this kind of outsider. And I thought that's a very, like, Nebraska thing. But, but the other parallel that occurred to me is that in, in both cases, the, the way that you present the material has really made the message there. Right. Like, there's a cut of First Blood that is like the later Rambo movies that's all testosterone, steroids and patriotism. But the actual thing that emerged is this kind of lo fi.
- [20:49]
C
Yes.
- [20:50]
B
Sad story of an outsider. And, you know, there's a way to present Nebraska. And that's kind of the point of the. Of the box set. Yeah, that's loud and bombastic and kind of the, the. The outside. My earlier impression of Springsteen. And then there's what actually was presented. And it's all in the. Those decisions that were made that are essentially editing decisions or presentational decisions.
- [21:11]
C
Yeah, I mean, it's. It's a great point.
- [21:12]
A
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- [22:14]
C
Right. And it. It points to the ways that so much of what that articulates in popular culture and with audiences is a product of conscious choices behind the scenes that nobody ever really sees, except for the people who are doing the producing. And sometimes those people are in control of their choices and are working intentionally, and sometimes they're not. Right. And one of the really interesting things about the box set of Nebraska that has just come out, as I said, that this idea that there were these electric full band recordings of these songs has been a mythic kind of elephant in the Springsteen fan community for decades and decades. And some of them appear here. It turns out that they did exist. And Springsteen himself didn't. Didn't even remember cutting them.
- [22:59]
B
Because he denied they existed. Right.
- [23:01]
C
He denied they existed, I think, not because he was being coy, but because he just, you know, they ran through half a dozen of the songs. He wasn't happy with what they were getting, and so they moved on.
- [23:13]
B
Yeah.
- [23:14]
C
And just kind of forgot about it. And one of the interesting things about this box set is that it actually elevates the original album in a way that sometimes these box sets don't. Right. The box sets that are meant to kind of fill out a period or offer alternate takes or B sides. And sometimes you listen to them, to these box sets, and you're like, the album should have been this collection of songs interwoven with what actually was put out. But in the case of Nebraska, all of the choices ended up being completely correct. There's nothing on that box set that should have been on the original album. So that's really kind of an interesting thing. And in the same way that I suspect that were we to watch the full cut of First Blood, we would come away with saying, no, they got it exactly right in the theatrical cut. Right. Nothing Here. It's all fine, and some of it's even sort of intriguing, but none of it would have made the original better.
- [24:09]
B
Right.
- [24:10]
C
And so that's a kind of an. Again, it just sort of illustrates to me like, that a lot of the art of. Of making the pop culture product takes place out of sight. And it's, it's intentional choices or sometimes it's happenstance that just works out. And I think that's what's happening here.
- [24:30]
B
Right, right.
- [24:31]
C
So this is the kind of the, the national context. Right. The other thing that's happening is, is that we're, you know, because of the kind of the, the coming to power of Reagan, older commitment to Cold War era rivalry politics with the Soviet Union, we're also starting to, the period of detente, so to speak, is starting to dissolve. Right. And the early 1980s in the United States and I think probably in the UK as well, is increasingly a time of Cold War tensions and anxieties pushing in a direction that sort of points to what we were just talking about in our last pod, the sort of. The potential of nuclear apocalypse that is also starting to happen in the US there's this infamous TV movie called the Day after that gets shown in early 1983. So again, right around the same time that depicts the United States and the aftermath of nuclear apocalypse. TV movies these days don't even exist, but that movie hit like a ton of bricks, so to speak, on the national psyche. So there's a lot of these kinds of cascading, almost layer cake, sorts of anxieties and tensions that are beginning to course through national life that, that are in, in many ways captured, I think, in, in Nebraska and then played on the smallest, most local of scales. Right. In each of these songs and in each of these narratives.
- [25:52]
B
Well, and Bruce himself is in, in a period of deep anxiety and, or depression, exhaustion.
- [25:59]
C
Yeah.
- [26:00]
B
You know, he's come off and this comes from the, the movie. You can tell me if it's, if it's wrong or not, but he's come off this kind of exhausting but highly successful tour, which is, you know, physically and mentally exhausting because he has this kind of ambivalent relationship with, with his success and maybe this kind of guilt or repressed guilt about the, the success. He says at one point in the, in the movie, I don't know if it's apocryphal or it really happened, but he goes to buy a car, ironically, because there is a song on here about back buying cars. And the salesman says at some point in the negotiations, you know, it's a great car for a good looking rock star. And I, I do know who you are, by the way. And Bruce says, well, that makes at least one of us. You know, he's in this period of kind of identity crisis, I suppose. And so all those national anxieties are also mirrored by channeled through contributing to a period of high anxiety.
- [26:51]
C
Yeah, and he's from the artist himself. You know, he's coming off of this period of concert performances, which even at the time were recognized and seen as historically impressive and important. The sheer caliber of the musicianship from the band at this point is at the top of the scales. The shows are getting longer and longer and longer. And so what had started off in the previous tour for Darkness on the Edge of Town as a tour, as a show that would approach three hours, but which would have an intermission in there as well, have now become like four hour shows with no intermission. And these shows have become these feats of kind of almost athletic endurance. And they take on this kind of mythic status amongst the audience, amongst rock critics. But it comes out that a lot of this is. Springsteen is exhausting himself. He comes later to recognize he's physically exhausting himself because that will force him to just be able to sleep.
- [28:00]
B
He said in one of the interviews I saw, I think it was an interview looking way back on the period. So a contemporary interview says the. The three hours on stage I'm good with, it's the other 21 that I'm struggling with.
- [28:11]
C
Right, right. Which is not an uncommon, I think, position for a lot of performers who find themselves, and I think notoriously, one of the reasons why touring is so difficult for so many musicians in particular is because the reason they're doing it is for those 90 minutes or three hours. But to do that is excruciating. And what do you do with yourself the rest of. When the only place that you feel comfortable is on that stage and performing in front of people, which is very much Springsteen at this point in his life. What do you do with yourself for the rest of the time? And, you know, for a lot of touring musicians, it's. It's drugs and alcohol or other kinds of destructive behavior because they don't have a kind of capacity to deal in a functional way with the exact thing that is pushing them out there onto the stage to perform, like these kind of high wire acts, you know, every night in front of rooms or. Or stadiums full of strangers. So. So all of that seems to be coming to a head in Springsteen's personal life at this point. And the other thing that's coming to a head is a lot of his repressed childhood traumas, particularly around his relationship with his parents and especially his relationship with his father. And so multiples of these songs are dealing with that as well, and the other thing that's happening that we'll get to after the break, by means of introduction to the album itself, is that Springsteen has been undergoing this kind of political consciousness raising, and it's beginning to infuse itself very clearly into his songwriting.
- [29:49]
B
Okay. All right. So we'll pick up on that after this very quick break. And we are back with our discussion of Bruce Springsteen and Nebraska. And we were talking about Bruce's sort of awakening political consciousness.
- [30:02]
C
Yeah. So. So one of the things that's happening in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and a lot of this does have to do with the influence of his manager, John Landau, who I understand has a starring role. His character has a starring role in the bio.
- [30:13]
B
Jeremy Strong. Played by.
- [30:16]
C
Played by Jeremy Strong. Yeah. And it's a close relationship that develops between Landau and Springsteen beginning in the mid-1970s on the born to Run tour, just before the Born To Run tour. And, you know, Landau has a kind of. He's a music critic by trade, and so he's a writer, and he's a bit of a thinker, and he kind of operates in this slightly intellectual realm which was becoming more and more prominent for music critics of the day. So this is the time he's a contemporary with somebody like Robert Chris Gao of the Village Voice or with Griel Marcus, who's written a ton of books as sort of. From the position of cultural critic via music, it's the onset of Rolling Stone, the publication Rolling Stone, which first finds its way into the mainstream vi this kind of music and cultural criticism.
- [31:02]
B
It's like that kid from Almost Famous who. You seen that movie?
- [31:05]
C
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
- [31:06]
B
Or Lester Bangs Hoffman.
- [31:08]
C
Exactly. Right. It's all of these. It's all of these figures who. They all kind of running in the same. Same circles. And so Landow brings to Springsteen, who's just a working class. You know, he's grown up very working class in Freehold, New Jersey, just kind of just outside of Asbury park, not that far from Atlantic City. And. And Springsteen has. You know, his education to this point has been rock and roll. Right. That. That has been the thing that has gotten him outside of himself and outside of his own life. And so he has dug into that influence as hard as humanly possible. Right. And so when you go back and you listen, for example, to Born to Run, the stories, the themes of isolation and alienation and sort of of precarity or marginality, they exist on that album as well, and they definitely exist on the next album, Darkness on the edge of town. But they exist within the register of rock and roll. They exist within the register of popular culture, specifically and popular music of the previous 25 or 30 years in particular. And Springsteen doesn't have any kind of formal education. He doesn't have any kind of meaningful artistic education outside of that realm. And so one of the things that Landau is introducing him to is he's getting more and more. Springsteen is getting more and more curious and starting to realize that rock and roll can only take you so far. If you want to really dig as deep as possible into the lives of your characters and event, really into his own sort of dysfunctional past. The rock and roll can only go so far, he thinks. And so one of the first things that Landau introduces him to is country music, old country music in particular. So artists like the Carter Family and Johnny Cash and especially Hank Williams, who Springsteen really spends a lot of time doing a deep dive on. And Springsteen concludes that this is where adult people in popular music, this is where adult people go to talk about adult things. Not just the flush of love and hate and.
- [33:19]
B
Oh baby, baby, yeah, yeah.
- [33:20]
C
Yeah and being horny all the time, which is sort of, you know, early rock and roll in particular has a kind of a lock hold right on, on these themes. So. But in country music you talk about other things, right? You talk about adult things. And so he finds Springsteen does a real kind of fountain spring of inspiration in early country music. But the other thing that Lando starts to do is he. He picks up on Springsteen's love of movies. And Springsteen has love, loves film noir, right? And Lando says you need to watch some of these other movies, right? And this is mid to late 1970s, early to mid-1970s in American cinema is the silver age of American directors. So famously Terrence Malick for Springsteen, but also Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola and Woody Allen, later George Lucas and Steven Spielberg. It's the rise in Hollywood of the director centered system, right? And so producers are starting to lose their hold in big, Big, you know, like Warner Brothers.
- [34:20]
B
It's auteur cinema.
- [34:22]
C
Yeah, it's autour cinema. It really gets its start. I mean, Argub, it's the start has been Orson Welles and, and Hitchcock earlier. But it really takes off in American Cinema in the 1970s. And they're starting to produce these kinds of movies that are difficult movies, right, that are the. The narratives are told in various ways. They are fractured. They tend to be movies that, that have big themes and they're really. These kinds of Vietnam era and then post Vietnam era reconciliations with the longstanding and occasionally dysfunctional big picture themes of the American community. And so there's a lot to. To work through in these movies. And, you know, the. The movie that Landau introduces Springsteen to that really catches his attention is Badlands.
- [35:12]
B
So here's an interesting point that the. The version of this in Deliver Me From Nowhere is Springsteen's in the. What's it called? Colt's Neck. Yep. Rented house, watching TV one night, and he happens to stumble across Badlands halfway through. All right, there's a. And you're gonna have to clear this up for me. Historically, there's a problem with that, which is he has a song on an earlier album called Badlands.
- [35:34]
C
Yes.
- [35:35]
B
And in the story you've just told me, it's actually John Landau purposefully introduces him to that movie. It's not just a serendipitous thing that he stumbles.
- [35:43]
C
I think that the timeline is a little haz on this. So the movie may well be correct and it. Springsteen may well not remember.
- [35:51]
B
Sure.
- [35:51]
C
But the earlier song Badlands is from the 1978 album Darkness on the Edge of Town.
- [35:57]
B
But is that about the movie?
- [35:58]
C
It is not. Okay, it is.
- [36:00]
B
So it could just be a naming.
- [36:01]
C
It. It's a naming convention. It's a song that is.
- [36:04]
B
Or you might have heard of the movie, but not seen it, certainly.
- [36:07]
C
And of course, I mean, Badlands is a reference to Badlands national park in South Dakota. And that's the other thing that's happening here. And we'll get it when we get into the songs in just a minute. Right. I think there's a purposeful slippage when he's tell. Telling this the murderous story of Charlie Starkweather and Carla Fugatte in the song Nebraska. I think there's purposeful, purposeful slippage here because, you know, our narrator says, through the Badlands of Wyoming. Well, the Badlands are in South Dakota.
- [36:32]
B
Yeah.
- [36:32]
C
But Stark Weather is totally plausible. That he wouldn't have known. Yes.
- [36:37]
A
Right.
- [36:37]
C
Where. Where he was or where they were. You're somewhere out in the plains and it's all kind of the same, anyway.
- [36:43]
B
Yeah.
- [36:44]
C
So. So Springsteen would have been aware of the. He would have heard the title. He would have been aware. This is not something that would have been totally unique to him. But the Badlands itself, it's Terence Malick's directorial debut. It stars Martin Sheen and Spacek, excuse me, as the protagonists of what is stylized retelling of an actual murder spree from a guy named Charlie Starkweather and Carla, who were. Starkweather was 18 or 19. Fugade was 14 or 15. And it's a loose telling, but it's more accurate than not of the actual events. And Starkweather was this kind of James Dean, like Rebel Without a Cause character, a kind of juvenile, or portrayed at least as sort of the nightmare image of the juvenile delinquent, which in the 1950s United States was one of the real bet noirs of mainstream popular culture. People to be feared. And you can watch Rebel Without a Cause, and there are bits and pieces of that characterization that we see in James Dean's performance. That's how Terrence Malick really plays up the Kit character, the Martin Sheen character. Kit Carothers in Badlands is he puts him in the James Dean get up. And it's a story about. It tells the story in a certain way of that murder spree, but it tells it in a way that is very much intended to evoke the images of pastoral America, the kind of conventional Americana images, and then turn them inside of themselves and to explore the kind of the dark heart at the center of the American dream.
- [38:28]
B
Right. And I think that's crucial in both Nebraska, the song, and Badlands, the movie that Starkweather's. I mean, he's a psychopath, but that's not really what's going on. Right. He's more a. He's active in that he kills people, but he's almost a passive of channeling a kind of latent. I don't know, evil or. Well, as Springsteen says in the song is a meanness in the world. And he's very like, oh, shucks, this is just how it's gonna. How it's gonna go. As he himself is authoring, you know, a murder spree.
- [39:02]
C
And there's a certain way that this is kind of the. This is freedom unbound. Right? Yeah. It's an inversion and a kind of nightmare storytelling of the. The. Of the Horatio Alger charge to go west, young man. Right there. This is where they're heading, right? They're going west and west and west, which in. In fabled Americana is where you go to reinvent yourself. It's where you go to. To make a life. It's where you get yourself unhinged from existing social constraints and you make something of yourself, which is in many ways like the promise of the American dream, so to speak. And what Malik is saying is what happens when you unhinge yourself from social constraints is that you enter into the land of murderers and psychop. People who are Disconnected, isolated and alienated. It's the exact land that the songs in Nebraska take place in.
- [39:50]
B
Yeah. And it's very. I mean it's finds a later expression I think like Cormac McCarthy. Like that's. That's very much his philosophy. Right. That there are. There's just a free floating sort of evil that. That finds its expression or manifestation in agents. But the agents are not. It's not really them necessarily. They're kind of inhabited by this. This. Or they become the. The specific instantiation of just what is a general. A world, a God that is indifferent to your fate and a general meanness of man.
- [40:20]
C
Yeah, that's a great point. I mean, you think about, for example, no country for Old Men.
- [40:24]
B
Exactly.
- [40:24]
C
Right. Which is this. This is. This is hitting all of that. Exactly. And the landscape is really important. Right. In the country for Old Men. And the landscape is super important in Badlands. And it. I think it's really important in Nebraska as well.
- [40:36]
B
Yeah. And you could see why. Why there's a flatness to Madden Sheen and even Sissy SpaceX kind of performance and a sort of lack of affect that's very redolent of psychopathy, but also would be very appealing or recognizable to someone in the midst of a depressive episode. It's just seeing the world as non vivid and as flat and responding to it in an emotionally underwhelming way while also taking quite extreme actions. In the case of the psychopath, in terms of harming other people. In the case of the depressive, either self harm or just a lack of concern for self.
- [41:18]
C
Yeah, that's really sharp. Right. And it's these punctuated moments of activity or punctuated moments of vividness in an otherwise landscape of just kind of nothingness or being, as Springsteen says, in multiple places. No, nowhere. Right, right. This is the experience of being in a depressive episode. One is nowhere. And these are characters who are nowhere in a whole variety of different ways. And there's a certain way in which the songs from Nebraska reflect in an almost transparent and one to one relationship what Springsteen is watching, what he's thinking, what he. He's. How he's experiencing the world in these moments. Even though a great many of the songs are not autobiograph autobiographical anymore.
- [42:08]
B
Well, that's it. So it's often called Springsteen's most personal album and yet it's told through third party characters. There's a bit in the movie where he writes out the lyrics to Nebraska and then he goes through and he changes he to I. You Know him to me.
- [42:25]
C
Yeah.
- [42:25]
B
All the way through. To make it personal. So he's inhabiting the character, but he's still inhabiting a real life third party.
- [42:32]
C
Yeah.
- [42:32]
B
Character. So it's a really interesting way of telling a personal story through sort of taking possession of the bodies and lives of others.
- [42:40]
C
And it allows for a lot of creative license as well.
- [42:43]
B
Sure.
- [42:43]
C
Right. And it allows. I imagine it would allow him to feel like he could explore things through characters that he was not willing.
- [42:52]
B
Right.
- [42:52]
C
To assign to his own. His own experience.
- [42:55]
B
Right. Absolutely. Last thing I wanted to say on Nebraska is the. And it's a comparison between the original and Electric Nebraska. Like the. That kind of opening burst of harmonica is so kind of iconic and so perfectly sets the tone for what is to come. And it's so sort of arresting and overwhelming on the original. And I think that one reason for not. There's plenty of reasons, but one reason for not having released Electric Nebraska is it kind of muddies that, you know, and dulls it. And it's. It's really important that that be the. And it'd be that sort of overwhelming and memorable. And it really gets you right in there. Yeah.
- [43:32]
C
And atonal.
- [43:32]
B
Yes. Right.
- [43:33]
C
Yeah. It's a great point. I hadn't.
- [43:35]
B
What's also harsh despair or you know.
- [43:39]
C
Yeah, it's a great point. I mean, because the harmonica plays a significant role. It's not uncommon for Springsteen to play harmonica even on. On sort of the more obvious rock songs, but it never plays such a prominent role music. And, And. And now that you say that, I. I think probably thematically as well as it does on these songs, it. He. That's the instrument that's needed. Along with that, the kind of. The glockenspiel which occurs in the background of a great many of these songs with the kind of the strange, almost carnival like sounds that get introduced into what appears otherwise to be a. A set of scenarios that wouldn't have any place for that sort of one. So. Musical sonic attitude. Yeah, yeah. But on the sonics. Right. Let's talk a little bit about. About the songs itself. You sort of alluded to this earlier. Like, to me, the songs sound ancient. They. And it's. It's the recording. There's. There's spooky. Right. A lot of these songs, I mean, think about like State Trooper, for example, which kicks off the second side. What would have been originally the second side of the album.
- [44:45]
B
I mean, that other one.
- [44:46]
C
That's a harrowing song.
- [44:47]
B
Stone stuff.
- [44:48]
C
Yeah, yeah. It's a harrowing song.
- [44:50]
B
Right.
- [44:50]
C
And. And I don't know how you recapture that sense of desperation in a studio with other musicians.
- [44:59]
B
Right, right. And as he's howling in the. Yes. Okay. All right. So what's going on there? He's asking. He's saying, please don't stop me because I'm gonna kill you.
- [45:08]
C
I'll kill you if you stop me.
- [45:09]
B
Okay. But he hasn't actually killed the person. It's just. He's driving because of course it has that. Driving.
- [45:14]
C
Yeah. You know. You know, he asks, he's thinking to himself, maybe you have a child. Maybe you have a pretty wife.
- [45:21]
B
Right.
- [45:21]
C
Like. Like the only thing that I have has been bothering me my whole life. And that, you know, this is the first place where the line Deliver me from nowhere.
- [45:29]
B
Yes.
- [45:30]
C
Occurs.
- [45:31]
B
Yeah.
- [45:31]
C
Well, what is the mode of deliverance here? I mean, he's sort of asking. On one hand, he's pleading with the state trooper not to stop him because I'll kill you. Right. If you do. On the other hand, that will be the mode of deliverance, like suicide, that violence. Right. Will be the moment of punctuation, the vivid moment of punctuation in an otherwise desperate and drab isolation existence.
- [45:53]
B
Yes.
- [45:55]
C
Deliver me from nowhere is a line that appears again in the next song or two songs later, Open All Night. And there it's very different. It's pitched very differently there. The line is. So in State Trooper, it's hey, ho, Silvero. Deliver me from nowhere. So that's hey, ho, Silver as a reference, I think, to the Lone Ranger. It's kind of the tagline of the Lone Ranger, which makes sense when you're talking about. About a character who is isolated, who is likely prone to violence and sees violence as a method of deliverance. In Open All Night, it's hey, ho, Rock and roll. Deliver me from nowhere. Right. So here we've got this kind of throwback to what we were talking about earlier, that you've got a character who's trying to push the bounds again, of what's possible in the sort of community of rock and roll to help deliver this guy from the sense of isolation. Right. That he's experiencing. It's actually. It's just little that, like, if it weren't a demo, if Nebraska weren't intended as a demo, he wouldn't have put the same lines in different songs.
- [47:00]
B
Right.
- [47:01]
C
And it occurs also in Johnny 99 and Atlantic City.
- [47:04]
B
What's that debt snow on his.
- [47:05]
C
I've got debts that no honest man can pay. There's no way. Right. If you were crafting a set of final songs that you would repeat those lines. Right. But the fact that they reappear just actually here provides significant continuity and coherence, and it makes it clear that we're dealing with an integrated sort of body of songs or an integrated text in a way that's, I think, pretty unique in popular music.
- [47:29]
B
Yeah. There's also two. I mean, I wonder if. Of course, it was deliberate, whatever. But there's two pairs of songs that have the same. You know, there's Used Cars and Open All Night, both about cars. And then there's Highway Patrolman and State Trooper that are both about cops. And they're both are back to back.
- [47:46]
C
And told from different perspectives.
- [47:48]
B
Right.
- [47:48]
C
I mean, Highway Patrolman is a devastating. Yeah. This is the story of Joe Roberts and his brother Frank. But it's also. It's a deeply melodic song. It's got one of the catchiest melodies and one of the catchiest choruses on the entire album. But it is a kind of. It is this sort of. Sort of micro storytelling that is masterful. And it ends, I think, in a surprising way. Right. You would expect the end to be this sort of violent confrontation between the brothers, a kind of canon Abel reincarnate. And instead what happens is, is that Joe just lets him go. Right. And chooses the relations of blood over the duties of the community.
- [48:31]
B
Yeah.
- [48:32]
C
And so it's a kind of a devastating song. And it's a song that hearkens back to one of. At least the imagery of one of Springsteen's earlier songs from Darkness on the Edge of Town, which is called Adam Raised A Cane. So these are, you know, not infrequently you'll see Springsteen delving in these kinds of biblical themes as well, or employing at least the outlines of Bible stories in order to bring to life contemporary moments or dramas. Which is the same thing, actually, that Terence Malick does in his second movie, Days of Heaven.
- [49:03]
B
Yes. Right.
- [49:04]
C
In which he's. It took me. We were talking off camera some time ago. It took me quite some time to realize that that is actually a story, the narrative that is very much a parable or set of. Consistent with a set of parables from the Book of Genesis.
- [49:18]
B
Yeah. I mean, the title did mention Heaven.
- [49:20]
C
Yes.
- [49:23]
B
No, but I hadn't got that either. The other thing that occurred to me is that what's going on thematically a lot in the album is this. And you just alluded to it, this. This sort of individual morality, individual kind of, you know, family ties and obligations and Definitely gifts, guilt, and then societal morality and societal obligations and the kind of clash between the two. So some of these lines, like debts an honest man can pay could definitely be Springsteen's character or Springsteen through his character, talking about debts I have to family or guilt I have personal guilt. Personal guilt about success and personal unease and so forth. But also there's a commentary on the crooked nature of the American dream in the age of. Of Reagan. Yeah, you know that. You know, there's. There's debts and honest men compare because honest men can't succeed in this society. And it's really. Those lines are working on two levels simultaneously.
- [50:19]
C
Yeah, no, yeah, I agree. And. And it's. And it might even be working on. On the third level that you alluded to was that it's. It's the. It's the debt of the kind of crooked inheritance of the sort of what you inherit. What you inherit. Inherit unwillingly and unwittingly from those who've come before you. Right? And here you've got a generation or a group of very frustrated and desperate characters who have inherited conditions not of their own making, social and economic, but you also have individual characters who have inherited through blood or other circumstance, conditions of life that were also not of their making.
- [50:59]
B
So everything that dies someday comes back. Is that what's going on there? What happens is that. What is that line about? So that's in Atlantic City.
- [51:06]
C
Atlantic City. It's. It's the course of Atlantic City. I always. I read that as the kind of. The. I think it's a cruel line. And. And it's. It's actually a desperate line in a way that. When you understand that the. So the reference here is to Atlantic City and the attempt of Atlantic City to fact. The factual attempt, its historical attempt to recreate itself from a. A dead and dying kind of. Of, you know, early 20th century resort town. Its attempt to reinvent itself essentially by getting in bed with the mob. Right. And. And organized crime and bringing in casinos and build. Building the boardwalk and building out the boardwalk. And the song begins with a reference to an actual mob hit. They blew up the Chicken man in Philly last night. Chicken man was a mob enforcer who got blown for. And I think it was the Gambino family. And he got blown up. Up. You know, and they blew up his house too. Right? And then all the lyrics are about the. The crime and the dysfunction of. Of what has happened in this city.
- [52:09]
A
Well, what.
- [52:09]
C
What had been promised, Atlantic City was dead. Everything that dies, maybe everything that dies someday comes back. This was the method of deliverance that was promised. Right. I'm going to, we're going to bring it back with gambling and so, but actually it's, you know, and when you look at the narrator's story in Atlantic City, you know, last night I met this guy, and I'm going to do a little favor for him, and that's the last that we hear. But we know it's not going to go well. We know the favor is, is illicit or illegal. And I mean, this is a guy who, who's finding himself now in bed essentially, with, with organized crime, one sort or another. And it's not going to get better. It's going to get worse and worse and worse. Everything dies. Maybe that's a fact, but maybe everything that dies someday comes back. Strikes me in that, not as hopeful, not as pointing necessarily to like sort of biblical terms of Jesus being resurrected on Easter morning, but rather like the kind of the hollowness of that sense of hope and optimism. Right. Because in fact, it's dead. And when things are dead, they don't come back. Right. That's the whole point. And we see this repeated again in My Father's House, which I am think is one of Springsteen's very best songs, an incredible song, and it's, it's a song of, of Springsteen dreaming that he has this moment of reconciliation with his father.
- [53:38]
B
Right.
- [53:40]
C
But it's dead. Yeah, right. That, and, and here, so literally, Springsteen's father was not dead at this time, but the possibility of a meaningful relationship is deep dead. It can't come back.
- [53:52]
B
Yeah, right.
- [53:52]
C
It's not coming back. And so the final lines, right, We, I, we walk across this highway where our sins lie unatoned. There will be no possibility to atone. Yeah, right. There's no, there is no deliverance. Right. And so when our narrators are asking to be delivered from nowhere, they're asking for something that's not possible.
- [54:11]
B
Right.
- [54:12]
C
I, I, I think those lines are actually even more devastating and despairing then they come off originally.
- [54:21]
B
Yeah. So there's a bit in the movie that I now wonder if it's, if it's not true. Springsteen's father sort of visits him in the, in the dressing room and asks, has him sit on his knee. And Springsteen's like, I'm 32 years old.
- [54:35]
C
That is true. Oh, yeah. So it's, you know, and they, they eventually have some moments of reconciliation when his father is eventually accurately diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic.
- [54:46]
B
Yeah.
- [54:46]
C
And is then like, it's Actual meaningful treatment.
- [54:49]
B
Right, Right.
- [54:49]
C
But that will happen much later.
- [54:51]
B
Okay.
- [54:52]
C
And it points to how do you ever repair. Right. The early breaches, the early family breaches between people who are so deeply emotionally connected with one another. How can you ever actually deal with that? Right. It would take extraordinary time and energy and personalities who are really committed to repairing those kinds of breaches to pull it off. And in a certain sense, it's dead. Right, Right. And it's the reason why it's so. In so many ways, a devastating song and a devastating commentary is that, I mean, we have those experiences. We all have those experiences as children. Great. Many of us have those experiences as parents as well. And to reflect back on, you say, how did I behave in these moments of kind of emotional peril?
- [55:50]
B
Right.
- [55:50]
C
Did I behave in ways that have forever ruptured the possibility of meaningful relationships? And, you know, we can talk about it in the future. You can. You know, you can try to work your way through it. But the odds of actually ever repairing such a fundamental breach of trust seem so long that what is much more likely to happen is, in fact, for the sins to lie on attention, Reason to Believe.
- [56:18]
B
The last song on the album, and it read, at least. At least on a surface level to me. And I haven't spent long enough to it to fully excavated, but I want you to help me here as a more hopeful note than sort of standing aside from the rest of the album a bit. I mean, am I getting the vibe right on that?
- [56:33]
C
I think that's one that is definitely on the surface. I have tended to read that over the years as a kind of a statement of the absurdity of. Of things. Because through all the verses, it's. It's just terrible things that are happening to people, right. They're. They're. They're.
- [56:50]
B
It's like. It's four stories, right? Like one in each verse.
- [56:53]
C
Yeah, they're coming across. Right. It begins. The first verse is, you know, a man came across a dead dog lying in the middle of the road or on the side of the road. And so the thing is dead, but he keeps poking it with a stick, thinking that it's going to come back to life. Right. Which goes back to the Atlantic City city line. Yeah. Everything that dies, maybe everything that dies someday comes back. So, I mean, to me, and. And all of the fact scenarios that are presented there in the stories are. You've got your protagonists in each of the little mini stories hoping for things, expecting things, holding on, clinging on to the possibility of things happening that couldn't possibly happen. Right. And it's interspersed. Those three kind of micro stories are interspersed with the verse about the baptism of the baby and the death of an old man. Right. This is the way that life works. Things die and then they're dead and other things are born. And it's absurd to poke the dead dog with a stick. It's insane. It's absurd and insane to stand there at the end of the road every day by the mailbox waiting for the person who left you years ago to come back. It's absurd and insane to be standing, having been stood up and clearly left isolated and alone at your wedding to expect it to change. So I think even reason to believe, which I think you accurately detect it on the surface as being this kind of strangely hopeful song. Right. Isn't it funny how at the end of the day, day, people still find some reason to believe at the end of every hard earned day? I actually think it's more of a commentary on the absurdity of faith. The absurdity of. Or not so much the absurdity of faith, but the absurdity of a kind of unverifiable optimism and hope and the cruelty of it all. And that maybe we're led to believe that one of the. The enabling conditions for the social and economic and political and communal isolation and desperation that these characters feel is because of the way that they have been done wrong by faithless hope.
- [59:16]
B
Yeah. Okay. Well, I think that brings us to the end of our kind of in depth excavation of Bruce Springsteen's Nebraska. I want to say thank you for being my guide to sort of broadening my horizons a little bit. I'm really glad we had the box set and the movie as kind of of a. A reason to talk about this, this album. And I'm. I'm really glad to have to have encountered it.
- [59:36]
C
Yeah, I, I mean, I always love talking and thinking about this album, but it's always exciting to introduce somebody to something and you do this with me all the time. Introduce somebody to something that you. Really means a lot to you and just kind of see what their reactions are.
- [59:49]
B
Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. All right, so thank you for coming along with us. Share your thoughts, you know, recollections, maybe of. Of Nebraska in the comments section or if you're new to the album, let us know. Us know, go in, listen, spin, let us know what you think. We always get a lot from the, from the comments. We really do appreciate them. But on that bombshell.