Springsteen as Odysseus

Returning to Nebraska to arrive at Born In the USA

For all you Springsteen people out there, you have to read Warren Zanes’ brilliant Deliver Me From Nowhere: The Making of Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska. As an intro, check out the KEEN ON interview below with Zanes recorded today.

In Deliver Me From Nowhere, Zanes imagines Bruce as Odysseus in his determination to slay his ghosts and return home as an adult This gives the making of Nebraska, Zanes believes, a Homeric quality. So, to make his classic 1982 album about the America of the Fifties, Bruce locked himself in a New Jersey bedroom with a TEAC cassette recorder and returned to his own defiantly anarchic childhood. But there’s no nostalgia here. Zanes believes that to grow up, Bruce had to make Nebraska. It was his way of getting to Born in the USA and the adult rules of global stardom.

In our conversation, Zanes suggests that Bruce still has one more great work of art in him - an album, he imagines, about death. Leonard Cohen has already done that, I responded. Embarrassedly, I forget its title. It is, of course, You Want It Darker, Cohen’s 2016 album released 17 days before his death, a work unimaginably foreign to Springsteen’s Nebraska.