{"id":6379,"date":"2025-11-09T18:34:09","date_gmt":"2025-11-09T23:34:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/streamapse.com\/Magazine\/?p=6379"},"modified":"2026-02-21T19:42:00","modified_gmt":"2026-02-22T00:42:00","slug":"bruce-springsteen-back-to-the-beginning","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/streamapse.com\/Magazine\/?p=6379","title":{"rendered":"Bruce Springsteen \u2014 Back To The Beginning"},"content":{"rendered":"

Bruce Springsteen\u2019s Nebraska didn\u2019t start out as a solo acoustic record. By the early 1980s, Springsteen had become frustrated with the time and money he\u2019d been spent working up songs in recording studios. He wanted to front-load his demos by crafting them at home, which would allow him to bring more fully-formed ideas to the members of the E Street Band. The mechanics of this process worked out as planned; the problem was that when Springsteen brought early versions of the Nebraska songs to his bandmates, the results weren\u2019t up to snuff. In fact, to quote Springsteen himself, fleshing out these tunes only \u201csucceeded in making the whole thing worse.\u201d<\/p>\n

So he went back to the beginning, returning to the material he\u2019d originally recorded on a four-track machine in his home in New Jersey. Those high and lonesome songs had the sound and vibe he was looking for, and after carrying a cassette tape of demos around in his back pocket for a very long time, he went into the studio with his engineer, and figured out how to turn it into Nebraska.<\/p>\n

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Stream Bruce Springsteen \u201cBruce Springsteen \u2013 Nebraska\u201d.<\/a><\/span><\/em> Image Courtesy Of Apple Services<\/strong><\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Released in 1982, Nebraska had more in common with the work of Johnny Cash or Hank Williams than it did with the party songs on The River, or with the rock \u2019n\u2019 roll orgies of Springsteen\u2019s live shows. But anyone who\u2019d been following the Boss for this long knew of his growing interest in country music\u2014and that fascination is all over Nebraska. The cast of characters on this record take bigger chances with their lives, which means that the stakes are higher and more brutal: The title track is Springsteen\u2019s take on the Starkweather-Fugate murder spree, while the folks in \u201cAtlantic City,\u201d \u201cJohnny 99,\u201d and \u201cHighway Patrolman\u201d are playing for the same kind of high stakes.<\/p>\n

And while Nebraska is an acoustic record, the stripped-down instrumentation allows the lyrics to land harder, and gives these songs a charge more powerful than any electric guitar solo. It\u2019s an eerie, sometimes disturbing, always thought-provoking album.<\/p>\n

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Bruce Springsteen\u2019s Nebraska didn\u2019t start out as a solo acoustic record. By the early 1980s, Springsteen had become frustrated with the time and money he\u2019d been spent working up songs in recording studios. He wanted to front-load his demos by crafting them at home, which would allow him to bring more fully-formed ideas to the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":5588,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[45],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6379","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-conversations"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/streamapse.com\/Magazine\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6379","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/streamapse.com\/Magazine\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/streamapse.com\/Magazine\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/streamapse.com\/Magazine\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/streamapse.com\/Magazine\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6379"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/streamapse.com\/Magazine\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6379\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6386,"href":"http:\/\/streamapse.com\/Magazine\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6379\/revisions\/6386"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/streamapse.com\/Magazine\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/5588"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/streamapse.com\/Magazine\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6379"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/streamapse.com\/Magazine\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6379"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/streamapse.com\/Magazine\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6379"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}