Zane's knowledge of pop culture over the last 40 years and his ability to describe it in an exciting, serious and authentic way make the story of Nebraska well worth reading. Everything about it was striped back including the cover, the inner liner photo had a picture of Bruce caught in his bedroom. 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. The natural follow-up to Springsteen’s hugely successful album The River should have been the hit-packed Born in the U. He has now been pretty open about his battles with depression and he’s always seemed to be a man who struggles with the height of fame that he has risen to.

The best part of the book is the closeness the author gets to Springsteen, (he was on board from the start ) they both eventually revisit t the rented house bedroom where the album was recored. Tim Riley’s latest book is What Goes On: The Beatles, Their Music, and Their Time (2019), co-written with Walter Everett, from Oxford University Press. He also emphasises the importance of its accidental genesis, the fact that Springsteen pressed ‘record’ on his new TEAC 144 4-track with no intention that these demos would be his next album, rather than sketches for what became Born In The USA. 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.Via Rolling Stone, Springsteen told his fans, “[I]f there’s any complaints on the way out, you can have your money back,” which defines bad faith from its least likely source. Sometimes the drums speed up because of a song’s emotion, sometimes a singer’s pitch drifts because that’s where the feeling takes it. Finance is provided by PayPal Credit (a trading name of PayPal UK Ltd, Whittaker House, Whittaker Avenue, Richmond-Upon-Thames, Surrey, United Kingdom, TW9 1EH).

Joe Roberts, the cop who narrates “Highway Patrolman,” lets his degenerate brother Frankie drive out of state after committing a murder.Zanes traces how the album’s punk rock spirit pushed back against the industry’s preferred polished sound to become a chart-topping success, and delivers the narrative in energetic prose that makes his enthusiasm for his subject palpable. He described it to me as “an accident start to finish” but also as the album that “still might be [his] best. uk/culture/books/bookreviews/8994760/Heart-Of-Darkness-Bruce-Springsteens-Nebraska-by-David-Burke-review.

It says volumes about the difference between today’s market and 1982 that Springsteen’s record label, Columbia, put Nebraska out according to the artist’s specifications: no snazzy video, no cover photo, and no production credit. 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.

The book ends strongly, with a series of musicians - including Rosanne Cash and Laura Cantrell - talking about Nebraska. Zane joins a group of people Springsteen works with who are characterised by one thing: their unique skills. But I always remembered that Springsteen passed on the first of those questions, which surprised me. By using the Web site, you confirm that you have read, understood, and agreed to be bound by the Terms and Conditions.

During this same period, the Cure’s leader, Robert Smith, made headlines by having Ticketmaster issue refunds for “service charges. Bruce Springsteen was nobody at that point, just a weird name that suggested anything but what was coming. Warren Zanes spoke to many people involved with making Nebraska, including Bruce Springsteen himself. Zanes interweaves these conversations with inquiries into the myriad of 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.WE THINK ABOUT Bruce Springsteen differently now from how we did in the 1970s when he first appeared, or the 1980s when he went mainstream, and it’s only in part because of his current tour’s Ticketmaster mess. Given the way Springsteen has interviewed throughout his career, it shouldn’t have come as a surprise that he seemed to hold back nothing. I loved “Nebraska” to death going into this book, but I walked away with a substantially higher estimation of it. But how and why Springsteen unraveled those dark story-songs, and the sheer effort it took to release them in the form they were in, has never been as thoroughly and fascinatingly explored as Zanes does here. P. at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum and is currently the Executive Director of Steven Van Zandt's Rock and Roll Forever Foundation.