Deliver Me from Nowhere: The Making of Bruce Springsteen's Nebraska

After we played the album, there was deathly silence…except for Bruce, who said, ‘That was f—king great.’

Novels we might read twice, generally once. Movies we might see a few times. Our favorite recordings? We can listen hundreds, even thousands of times. They go through our systems in a very different way. A great recording, listened to hundreds and hundreds of times over a period of years, even decades, can suddenly open onto a new vista or back alley. The medium is dense. And, obviously, whatever one is going through in life triggers that density in different ways.

Songs, unlike people, have remarkable patience as they wait for someone to hear what they’re saying.

Guitar Town was out, and it was doing okay," [Steve] Earle recalled. "But the label didn't want it to happen. Jimmy [Bowen] certainly didn't. He didn't like the record. He didn't like me. But it was out there and got really good reviews, though mostly from the rock side of things. . . . "'Guitar Town' was doing okay as the second single," Earle said. "Then around the same time, Bruce Springsteen walked into Tower Records in L.A. and bought a couple of things. He got Willy DeVille's first solo record, and he bought Guitar Town. A kid who worked there at Tower reported it, and it ended up in a column in Billboard. I sold fifty thousand records the next week and got booked all over the place. So that was it: I had a career largely because Bruce bought my record and it got into print.

Nebraska made it almost impossible for critics to miss Springsteen's willingness to take a chance in the name of his art. If Springsteen was driven simply by fame and mainstream success, there would have been no good reason to make or release a Nebraska. The album made it impossible to use the word "sellout.

Nineteen eighty-two is as good a year as any to mark the threshold of a future we're still negotiating. It's been called the information age, the digital age, the new media age. It was the beginning of the "digital turn" that would, in fits and starts, transform music culture . . . .