You can buy this CD here:
The following notes, written by Bruce, are taken from the book "Songs".
By early 1981, after a year of touring around the world for The River, I came back to New Jersey and began thinking about my next record. I'd grown tired of expending so much energy in professional recording studios where I rarely got the right group of songs I was after without wasting a lot of time and expense. I found the atmosphere in the studio to be sterile and isolating, and the long drifting records emotionally wearing. I decided I needed to find a way to hear my songs before I brought them into the studio.
I called my guitar tech and asked him to pick up something that would be suitable for some cheap and easy home recording. He came back with a four-track Teac tape machine, and we set it up in my bedroom in Colts Neck, New Jersey. That was where I recorded Nebraska.
The songs on Nebraska connected to my childhood more than any other record I'd made. The tone of the music was directly linked to what I remembered of my early youth. We lived with my grandparents until I was six. Thinking through these songs, I went back and recalled what that time felt like, particularly my grandmother's house. There was something about the walls, the lack of decoration, the almost painful plainness.
Our house was heated by a single kerosene stove in the living room. One of my earliest childhood memories was the smell of kerosene and my grandfather standing there filling the spout in the rear of the stove. All of our cooking was done on a coal stove in the kitchen. As a child, I'd shoot my watergun at its hot, iron surface and watch the steam rise.
The centerpiece of our living room was a single photo of my father's older sister who died at the age of five in a bicycle accident around the corner by the local gas station. Her ethereal presence from this 1920s portrait gave the room a feeling of being lost in time.
At home, just before recording Nebraska, I was reading Flannery O'Connor. Her stories reminded me of the unknowability of God and contained a dark spirituality that resonated with my own feelings at the time. Film continued to be an influence. I'd recently seen True Confessions and Terrence Malick's Badlands. There was a stillness on the surface of those pictures, while underneath lay a world of moral ambiguity and violence.
The songs were written relatively quickly because they all rose from the same ground. They took three, maybe four takes to record. Some, like "Highway Patrolman" and "State Trooper," only one. But most everything was done in no more than a few weeks. "Mansion on the Hill," which I had the beginning of for some time, was the first song I finished; "My Father's House" was the last. When I wrote "Nebraska," my retelling of the Charles Starkweather--Caril Fugate 1950s murder spree, I'd found the record's center. The songs tapped into white gospel and early Appalachian music, as well as the blues. In small detail--the slow twirling of a baton, the twisting of a ring on a finger--they found their character. I often wrote from a child's point of view: "Mansion on the Hill," "Used Cars," "My Father's House"--these were all stories that came directly out of my experience with my family.
The songs had religious and political overtones, but more importantly, I was trying to get them to sound right. That's what would deepen the images. I thought of John Lee Hooker and Robert Johnson--records that sounded so good with the lights out. I wanted to let the listener hear the characters think, to get inside their heads, so you could hear and feel their thoughts, their choices.
There was a natural link between the songs on The River and those on Nebraska. "Stolen Car," "Wreck on the Highway," "Point Blank," and "The River" reflected a shift in my songwriting style. My Nebraska songs were the opposite of the rock music I'd been writing. These new songs were narrative, restrained, linear, and musically minimal. Yet their depiction of characters out on the edge contextualized them as rock and roll.
If there's a theme that runs through the record, it's the thin line between stablilty and that moment when time stops and everything goes to black, when the things that connect you to your world--your job, your family, friends, your faith, the love and grace in your heart--fail you. I wanted the music to feel like a waking dream and the record to move like poetry. I wanted the blood on it to feel destined and fateful.
All popular artists get caught between making records and making music. If you're lucky sometimes it's the same thing. When you learn to craft your music into recordings, there's always something gained and lost. The ease of an unselfconscious voice gives way to the formality of presentation. On certain records, that may enhance the music you're making and help you find a receptive audience. On other records, it may destroy the essential nature of what you've done.
I sat in a chair, singing and playing into a couple of microphones. With the two tracks left, after I sang and played the song, I could add a harmony or hit the tambourine. Sometimes I added a guitar. On four tracks that was all you could do. I mixed it through a guitar echoplex unit into a beat box, like the one you take to the beach. They were just "demos." After that, I went into the studio, brought in the band, rerecorded, remixed, and succeeded in making the whole thing worse. Finally satisfied that I'd explored all the music's possibilities, I pulled the original home-recorded cassette out of my jeans pocket where I'd been carrying it and said, "This is it."