Bruce Springsteen discussing the lyricism found in his beloved album “Nebraska”

Bruce Springsteen said, “I lived in this house exactly half a lifetime ago.” Though it may not seem like much, Springsteen wrote the 10 somber and melancholy songs that make up his 1982 album “Nebraska,” in this little bedroom in Colts Neck, New Jersey—which still has the original orange shag rug—in this space. “This is the room where it happened,” he said.
I saw her only whirling her baton while standing on her front yard.

Ten innocent persons lost their lives when me and her went for a trip, sir.
From Lincoln, Nebraska, I was sitting on my lap with a sawed-off.410.
Up until I reached the Wyoming badlands, I destroyed everything in my way.
“If I had to pick one album out and say, ‘This is going to represent you 50 years from now,’ I’d pick ‘Nebraska,” he said.
When Springsteen wrote it 42 years ago, his inner life was going through a lot of turmoil. “I just hit some sort of personal wall that I didn’t even know was there,” he remarked. “It was my first real major depression where I realized, ‘Oh, I’ve got to do something about it.’”
Just off the heels of a very successful “The River” record tour, he scored his first Top 10 single, “Hungry Heart.” A true rock star surrounded by success at thirty-two, he was discovering the limitations of his fame.
Axelrod said, “Your rock ‘n’ roll meds, singing in front of 40,000 people, all that is, is anesthesia.”
Yeah, Springsteen said, “and it worked for me.” “A lot of things seem to work for you while you’re in your 20s. You begin to mature as an adult in your 30s. I suddenly asked myself, “Where is everything?” as I glanced about. My home is where? My spouse is where? Where are the boys and girls that I believed I would one day have? And I came to the conclusion that none of those items exist.”I thus decided that the first thing I needed to do when I arrived home was to remind myself of my background and identity.”
He would attempt to figure out why he was feeling so estranged from his achievements in the renovated farmhouse he was renting. “It’s all within me,” he said. “You can either take it and transform it into something positive, or it can destroy you.”
According to author Warren Zanes, “Not all books, movies, and music arrive at the front door. They enter via the rear entrance, ascend via a trap door, and remain in your life.”
“Deliver Me from Nowhere,” Zanes’ most recent book, provides an in-depth and poignant analysis of the filming of “Nebraska.”
Springsteen’s early loneliness was the source of his misery. “Here’s Bruce Springsteen making a record from a kind of bottom in his own life,” said Zanes. “They had really little income. He then transforms into Bruce Springsteen. He had the impression that his past was complicating his present. And he desired to be released from it.
Springsteen has always believed that writing was the path to emancipation. He filled notebook after notebook with writings, thinking to himself, “It’s funny, because I don’t remember doing all this work!” But the album didn’t come together until late at night, when he was channel surfing and came across Terrence Malick’s “Badlands,” a film about Charles Starkweather, who went on a murderous rampage in 1957 and 1958, primarily in Nebraska. “I actually called the reporter who covered that story in Nebraska,” he said. Remarkably, she remained with the publication. We spoke for around thirty minutes, and she was a really kind lady. It also served to kind of concentrate my writing attention on the emotion I wanted to convey.”
Springsteen had discovered his inspiration in a serial killer: “I can’t say that I’m sorry for the things that we done.”
We had some fun together, at least for a little period, sir.
Their question was: Why did I do what I did?
Well, sir, I suppose that’s simply the nature of this world: meanness. That explains all of Starkweather’s actions,” Axelrod said.
“Yeah, I tried to locate where their humanity was, as best as I could,” Springsteen replied.
He wrote fifteen songs in a few weeks during a creative frenzy, and one January evening in 1982, the time came to record them on a four-track cassette machine. One of the biggest names in rock & roll sat by himself in this bedroom and sang, creating the exact sound he was going for.
How about the sound quality? With a “not bad,” Springsteen said. “It looks really dead because of the orange shag carpet. The echo is not very strong. Not only was it lovely, but it was also practical.”
Certain songs—like “My Father’s House”—explored the confusion that lingered from childhood:
After climbing the stairs and taking a seat on the porch, a stranger approached me and struck up a conversation.
I told her my story through a chained door and who I had come to get.
She replied, “I’m sorry, son, but no one by that name Lives here anymore”
According to Springsteen, “‘Mansion on the Hill,’ ‘My Father’s House,’ ‘Used Cars,’ they’re all written from kids’ perspectives, children trying to make sense of the world that they were born into.”
Some adults who were profiled were excluded or neglected. Springsteen insisted that the song had a “very stark, dark, lonely sound.” Very austere, very bare bones.” 
On a broken-down boom box, Springsteen mixed the songs onto a cassette tape he carried around in his back pocket, for a few weeks. “I hope you had a plastic case on it, at least,” said Axelrod.
“I don’t think I had a case,” he replied. “I’m lucky I didn’t lose it!”
Springsteen’s band would record what he had on the cassette, but bigger and bolder wasn’t what he was looking for: ”It was a happy accident,” he said. “I had planned to just write some good songs, teach ’em to the band, go into the studio and record them.  But every time I tried to improve on that tape that I had made in that little room? It’s that old story: if this gets any better, it’s gonna get worse.”
Bruce Springsteen wasn’t working E Street, but another road entirely. According to Zanes, “‘Nebraska’ was muddy. It was imperfect. It wasn’t finished. All the things that you shouldn’t put out, he put out.” 
Everything dies, baby, that’s a fact
But maybe everything that dies some day comes back
Put your makeup on, fix your hair up pretty
And meet me tonight in Atlantic City
Axelrod asked, “Did any part of you worry, ‘Oh my goodness, what am I putting out there?’”
“I knew what the ‘Nebraska’ record was,” Springsteen said. “It was also a signal that I was sending that, ‘I’ve had some success, but I do what I want to do. I make the records I wanna make. I’m trying to tell a bigger story, and that’s the job that I’m trying to do for you.’”
A few more songs that didn’t make the cut? You probably heard them later, including “Born in the U.S.A.,” “Pink Cadillac,” and “Downbound Train” – songs the guy in the leather jacket who’d written of chrome-wheeled fuel-injected suicide machines kept in a binder with Snoopy on the cover.
In that small bedroom, Springsteen the rocker made an album that fleshed out Springsteen the poet. Imagine for a moment if he hadn’t. Axelrod mused, “And then people might be assessing a career and say, ‘Oh, it was great, man, 70,000 people singing “Rosalita” in the stadium.’ But that might have been closer to where it ended in considering what you’ve done.”
Yes. “I was simply drawn to something more, something beyond that,” said Springsteen. “I like carrying it out. It’s still something I like doing. However, I want more than that.
“If they want to enjoy your work, try anything; if they want to understand your work, try ‘Nebraska’?” asked Axelrod.
“Yeah, I’d agree with that,” he replied. “I’d definitely agree with that.” 

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