Six Degrees of Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska
It used to be easier to pretend that an album was its own perfectly self-contained artifact. The great records certainly feel that way. But albums are more permeable than solid, their motivations, executions and inspirations informed by, and often stolen from, their peers and forbearers. It all sounds awfully formal, but it's not. It's the very nature of music — of art, even. The Six Degrees features examine the relationships between classic records and five other albums we've deemed related in some way. In some cases these connections are obvious, in others they are tenuous. But, most important to you, all of the records are highly, highly recommended.
The Album
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Bruce Springsteen's Nebraska is one of the most notable outliers in the history of rock & roll. Known for bombast, grandiosity and a landmark live show, the Springsteen of 1982 was coming off the ambitious double-LP The River with a Nor'easter of a wind at his back. And then came Nebraska with its death-letter mood and somber rudimentaries, an album that did more than pay lip service to Woody and Dylan, as meditative an American eulogy as pop music has ever produced. That people loved it, that it was so well-received that it hit #3 on the Billboard album chart and "Atlantic City," the album's full-throated and deeply mournful fulcrum, was a Top 10 pop hit, is simply a testament to the cult of Bruce. His sweat, his charisma, the crinkles of his eyes when he broke into one of his "aw shucks" wide-open grins were the down payment on that success. It's hard to think of a more harrowing record to have broken wide. Nebraska has come to exist as something outside even Springsteen. Nebraska is a type of record now. It's a statement of intent, a call to introspection. It's an equation: acoustic guitar + reverbed voice + a bedroom four-track sticky with cigarette tar on a table stained by the rings of whiskey tumblers. Nebraska means honesty, sincerity. It's a record made for no one, an incidental audience. It's one of the greatest records ever made. And while not all of these albums can make that claim, they have the spirit of Nebraska deep inside of them, and never intentionally so. Like the murderous quiet of "State Trooper," these songs were simply meant to exist.
The Forefather
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More than any other performer, Cash can take credit for Nebraska. The topography of Cash's baritone alone on the early Sun singles templates it: lots of reverb quieting a hellfire that you cannot possibly imagine. Even when Cash sang something relatively trivial like "Get Rhythm," a darkness lurked at the edges, a sentence best left unfinished. Viewed through the context of Nebraska and its marauding murderers and desperate (and despairing) teenage love, the incredible "I Walk the Line" suddenly sounds threatening. The chorus' "because you're mine/ I walk the line" feels less like an endearment and more of a threat, its pronouncement of "I keep you on my mind/ Both day and night/ And happiness I've known proves that it's right" the mutterings of a Peeping Tom in dirty jeans tumbling from his perch and into the bushes, a blood-encrusted knife tucked into his boot.
The Hero
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Like Springsteen's use of 1950s teenage murderers Charles Starkweather and Caril Ann Fugate (the inspiration for Terrance Malick's impeccable film Badlands, another obvious Nebraska touchstone), this is a true-crime folk album, a song-by-song recounting of the executions of two Italian immigrants wrongly convicted of murder in 1920s Massachusetts. No detail is too small for the masterful Guthrie, whose righteous disgust is best illustrated in "Two Good Men (Sacco and Vanzetti)," a beautiful song with the refrain, "Two good men a long time gone/ Left me here to sing this song."
The Punks
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Springsteen on a budget. The young Vile has Springsteen's swagger, songs and the (non)production qualities of Nebraska down pat on this, his excellent first record. He's a guitar guy first and foremost, little riffs (electric) and twirls (acoustic) grounding his songs, his singing more stream-of-consciousness, the vocal melodies stacked atop his one-man-band arrangements like dirty dishes. He is also an exceptional songwriter: tracks like "Freeway" and "Breathin Out" strut, but with a melancholy limp to the gait. And "Slow Talkers" is vintage Nebraska, nothing but muffled promises and choked lies.
The Kid
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The distant echoes of Nebraska immediately conjure two things to any rock aficionado: the distant echo of Elvis Presley's incredible "Mystery Train" and the hissing recordings of Robert Johnson. These haunting recordings have served as the foundation of so many albums, and Nebraska certainly ranks among them.
