Deliver Me from Nowhere
The Making of Bruce Springsteen's Nebraska
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- $24.99
Publisher Description
The fascinating story behind the making of Bruce Springsteen’s most surprising album, Nebraska, revealing its pivotal role in Springsteen’s career—now with a new afterword
Soon to be a major motion picture starring Jeremy Allen White (The Bear)
“Brilliant . . . For fans of American music, Deliver Me from Nowhere makes a great ghost story.”—The Boston Globe
AN NPR BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR
Without Nebraska, Bruce Springsteen might not be who he is today. The natural follow-up to Springsteen’s hugely successful album The River should have been the hit-packed Born in the U.S.A. But instead, in 1982, he came out with an album consisting of a series of dark songs he had recorded by himself, for himself. But more than forty years later, Nebraska is arguably Springsteen’s most important record—the lasting clue to understanding not just his career as an artist and the vision behind it, but also the man himself.
Nebraska is rough and unfinished, recorded on cassette tape with a simple four-track recorder by Springsteen, alone in his bedroom, just as the digital future was announcing itself. And yet Springsteen now considers it his best album. Nebraska expressed a turmoil that was reflective of the mood of the country, but it was also a symptom of trouble in the artist’s life, the beginnings of a mental breakdown that Springsteen would only talk about openly decades after the album’s release.
Warren Zanes spoke to many people involved with making Nebraska, including Bruce Springsteen himself. He also interviewed more than a dozen celebrated artists and musical insiders, from Rosanne Cash to Steven Van Zandt, about their reactions to the album. Zanes interweaves these conversations with inquiries into the myriad 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. The result is a textured and revelatory account of not only a crucial moment in the career of an icon but also a record that upended all expectations and predicted a home-recording revolution.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this intimate retelling of how Bruce Springsteen's most introspective album came to be, musician Zanes (Petty) unpacks the psyche, pathos, and music industry machinery that made it so surprising and stirring. Before Springsteen's hit-packed 1984 album Born in the U.S.A., there was Nebraska—an album Zanes lovingly compares to "a cave painting in the age of photography." Despite the fact that it was laid down on a cassette recorder in a room with wall-to-wall shag carpet at a New Jersey rental house, Zanes calls Nebraska the Boss's most important work, an "album that was cutting deals with no one" and stripped away so much of what seemed required for commercial success ("clean and clear fidelity, perfect performances") that "all that was left was the grunt of art." In interviews with Springsteen, Zanes details how the artist recorded Nebraska during one of his "loner periods"—a time of deep soul-searching during which he probed his childhood in songs such as "Mansion on the Hill" and "My Father's House." Early chapters fill in backstory to the record's creation and later ones break down the album song by song. 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. Rock 'n' roll fans will want to crank this up to 11.
