Wow! Wow! Wow! I don’t even know where to begin. Full disclosure: I am a hardcore Springsteen fan. I have seen him perform countless times including his Broadway show and an even more intimate show at the little Somerville Theater in Massachusetts. I have also read many books about him including his celebrated autobiography.

Warren Zanes has given us the most intimate and revelatory portrayal of Mr. Springsteen I have ever read, and its focus is only on the making of Nebraska between the end of the heralded River Tour and the release of Born in the USA which catapulted him into superstardom. Zanes is a conscientious researcher, writer, and interviewer. Springsteen’s involvement in this project and his willingness to share his private experiences were critical. Springsteen gave Zanes access into his soul and Zanes delivered a masterpiece. Zanes considers “Nebraska” the way an art buyer might study a sculpture for sale — he eyes it from every angle, researches its creator, delves into the culture and the politics of when the piece was made. The album’s structured to tell the story of murderer Charles Starkweather and his accomplice, Caril Fulgate. He tells the story without judgment, and considers the characters to be a pivotal part of his work. Zane is also fascinated by the tension between being in a band and being an individual. His own experience in a band informs his take. The scenes of the E Street Band trying to record these songs are riveting.Having set the stage, what follows is an incredibly well researched, set-up and mapped-out account of how a then detached Springsteen, having just scored his first number one record with The River and around two-thirds poised for what would be one of the biggest selling albums of all time (Born in the USA), churned out what many consider to be his best work. Erase the performer, the verve, energy, the bombast and the optimism. Replace open roads for empty towns. Haunting dirges for full swinging bands. Broken spirits for young men. And an album covers of a desolate landscape instead of the profile of the talented Springsteen. Only then do you get close to imagining the austere Midwestern desert known as “Nebraska” In short, he was just coming off a hit record, was an early adopter of "home recording" technology, (my hook to the record/book) made some stuff at home that was way different than his previous work, but that was also really dark, and unintentionally auto-biographical, and then he had to unwind what exactly that was and where it went, so to speak.. all the while having his next record, the commercial success apex of his career, in the can, and sitting on a shelf while he worked this all out. Warren Zanes was practicing with his band, the Del Fuegos, when he first met Bruce Springsteen who came in to tell them that their album was great, jammed on a few songs, and like a ghost was gone. Zanes was a fan of Springsteen's especially the Nebraska album, one of which he knew many other musicians of the early 80's also had a love for. Zanes has since become a writer of music biographies, a college professor, and worked on movies, and had the idea that he needed to write about this special album. Zanes discusses the album with musicians, members of Springsteen inner circle and of course the Boss himself. Zanes looks at the creation, why Springsteen needed to create such a dark album, and the influences from books, films and more. Every aspect is looked at from recording in a small bedroom, to the reception of the album by Springsteen's record label. Too many excerpts from interviews and books I’ve already read. Fascinating theory that without Nebraska there wouldn’t have been BITUSA.

This book, more than any other, reveals the hidden corners of Bruce Springsteen’s creative world. 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. Warren Zanes, one of our very finest music writers, always comes from the place of the music and its maker. No one else could have told this story.” Judd Apatow Forgot to mention in my post yesterday that I read Deliver Me From Nowhere, a short little book about the making of Springsteen's Nebraska album. It was good. I think it was a piece of missing context for me in the discourse around Springsteen as a pre-eminent artist. I mean, there's no doubting the hits, and his stuff is good, but I think there's a deeper thing there. Maybe it's the hero cycle of suffering for your art, or having existential crisis or something.. and I think that this record is a pretty stark embodiment of whatever that thing is. You can waste your access by protecting your subject or trying to get too pretty. Warren Zanes does neither. He honors the access he gets to all of his central characters. If you’re a writer, his gift will make you jealous. But not jealous enough to stop reading. This is the Springsteen book we’ve been waiting for.” —Geoff Edgers, national arts reporter for The Washington Post and author of Walk This Way: Run-DMC, Aerosmith, and the Song that Changed American Music Forever Nebraska' came at us cold, without interviews, videos, or promo. Springsteen wanted fans to have their own journey with the music. He trusted his art and trusted his audience.Warren Zanes is in possession of a genuine, often astonishing writerly gift. This book is about Bruce Springsteen’s weird, gothic, heartbroken 1982 left turn,‘Nebraska,’which is not just a startling swerve in the career of a great American artist or a pivotal yet neglected transitional moment in the history of recorded music, but the question Springsteen asked himself forty years ago: what do you do when you begin to understand that the things you have loved most have begun to do you harm? This is some of Zanes’s best writing ever, which is saying a lot.” Michael Chabon, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of“The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay” Brilliant reading . . . For fans of American music, Deliver Me from Nowhere makes a great ghost story.”— The Boston Globe In Deliver Me from Nowhere: The Making of Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska, Warren Zanes tells how that cassette took on a life of its own when Springsteen decided to release the songs just as he recorded them. Zanes explains how Springsteen came to that moment, and the challenges involved in a major artist releasing an album he didn’t know he was making that only existed on a piece of technology that didn’t interface well with more sophisticated studio equipment.