Springsteen, Lost and Found

Zanes: “He made this strange record right at a point where, career-wise, he could have gone from stardom to superstardom.”

For more than 50 years, Bruce Springsteen has been the people’s rock star. Hit songs like the hopeful “Promised Land” and the anthemic “Born in the U.S.A.” are homages to the working class from one of their own. But it’s Nebraska, the unfiltered, unapologetic, unyielding album recorded in a rented farmhouse on rudimentary equipment, on which Springsteen lays his humanity bare. In Deliver Me from Nowhere: The Making of Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska, musician and historian Warren Zanes MA’95 breaks down the record and follows the many lives it’s lived since its quiet 1982 debut.

“Nebraska was a recording that was really close to me,” Zanes says. “I would return to it particularly when there was trouble in my life, but it was a recording that I still didn’t understand.”

The follow up to Springsteen’s first number one album (The River) and first top 10 single (“Hungry Heart”), Nebraska was an anomaly. Recorded on convenience-store cassettes, it could not be mixed or mastered, much less played on FM radio. The songs were gray and gritty, with characters who sat in electric chairs instead of Cadillacs and pleaded with state troopers instead of “Sherry darling.” It was released without promotion and to much puzzlement.

“He made this strange record right at a point where, career-wise, he could have gone from stardom to superstardom,” Zanes says. In Deliver Me from Nowhere, Zanes interviews individuals whose lives were touched by Nebraska — from fellow artists who credit it as an inspiration to Springsteen himself — to answer the questions that have haunted the album for more than four decades.

Zanes’s book was adapted into a major motion picture, Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere. It premiered at the Telluride Film Festival in August and was released in theaters in October.

Published in the Winter 2025 issue