He didn’t make weak records, but his live performances exceeded anything he managed to capture on tape. It is darkly beautiful and repays close attention and I think Zanes enhances the listening experience by explaining the troubled background to the album - Bruce's ambivalence towards his new found fame and his feelings of isolation and emotional disconnection. Just voice, guitar, harmonica and organ, recorded on an early home studio system, reveal an artist trying to reclaim his narrative after the inevitable hijackings of fame. Early chapters fill in backstory to the record’s creation and later ones break down the album song by song. html "Blake is good on Springsteen's background - and his fractious relationship with his father - and indulges himself with lots of opinions about Springsteen's later work.

The author draws on new interviews with key associates, but securing the participation of Springsteen himself greatly broadens the book’s emotional scope. This book is about Bruce Springsteen’s weird, gothic, heartbroken 1982 left turn, ‘Nebraska,’ which is not just a startling swerve in the career of a great American artist or a pivotal yet neglected transitional moment in the history of recorded music, but the question Springsteen asked himself forty years ago: what do you do when you begin to understand that the things you have loved most have begun to do you harm? Soaking wet, Dylan, 68, gave his name to Kristie Buble, a 24-­year-­old police officer, and informed her that he was in town to headline a concert with country star Willie Nelson and rocker John Mellencamp. two years later, but only after laying down an aesthetic marker that screamed through its whispers, as if to say, “Fame feels like a curse, and I have to confront this stuff first. But more than forty years later, “Nebraska” is one of Springsteen’s most important records — the lasting clue to understanding not just his career as an artist and the vision behind it, but also the man himself.Whether you see Springsteen in them or not, whether the amps and guitars are in the room or not, you look at them knowing who was there once and what got done at the time, Darkness on the Edge of Town and much of The River. I guess the only question that wasn’t answered for me in this book is why some of the songs from this session were never used. Much to my wife's chagrin, I'm into Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band and have read and watched everything about him over the years.

When he sings “Johnny 99” on this tour, it’s more a public wail than a covert monologue, and even so, it turns a private scar into a gaping open wound.Landau puts it like this to Zanes: “It’s like he had his Star Wars and his art movie in his hand at the same moment. Finally, last month, homeowners in Long Branch, 30 miles south of New York, phoned the authorities when they noticed a scruffy figure ambling along a residential street and entering the yard of an up-­for-­sale house. It took me a long time to read because it is so interesting and full of insights that I had to keep stopping to think about what he was saying. But I always remembered that Springsteen passed on the first of those questions, which surprised me.