Meet Me Tonight In Atlantic City

Is Bruce Springsteen's 'Nebraska' The Greatest Album Of All Time?

I am flying down the open highway at a hundred kilometres an hour. There are no cars ahead of me and I am alone. The past few days have been spent visiting a friend up the North Coast. He told me it would take two hours to get there from Sydney. It took more like five.

On the last day, I choose to stay until after dinner to make the most of the day - a day spent eating by the lake, playing pool, talking about music, and swimming off Seal Rock. Despite there being no cars, the journey feels even longer in the dark. The headlights of my car lick the tarmac just ahead of me, and that is all I see. Driving at night is a lonely place. Nothing moves, and all you see is road.

Almost on cue, the aux cord has decided this will be the moment to stop working, with four hours still to go. Time to go manual. Beneath the passenger seat lies a sea of cracked CDs. There was a period there where I collected CDs - to no financial incentive. I said it was because I liked the liner notes. I think it was just something to go buy during lockdown. My hand slides across their clear, smooth surface as I try and keep both eyes still on the road. Grabbing whatever is lying on top, I look down to see I am holding Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska. I smile, opening the cover, unclipping the disc, and as if I am threading a needle, I manoeuvre the disc into the CD player. The only sound is the faint hum of the wheels on the road. Then, out of the dark, a single harmonica comes floating through the air and a different journey begins.

I came to Springsteen like any other child: through their father. The Boss. The loud, infinitely energetic, exceedingly charming, louder than life, Boss. I was forced, yes, forced to watch Springsteen live shows on DVD. Darkness On The Edge Of Town, Born To Run, Born In The USA, The River, these albums lived in my life rent free. From the age of one through to about the age of sixteen, you could be forgiven for thinking of Springsteen as your dad’s best mate. And my dad wasn’t even American! Why did he love this guy, this dude, who encapsulated the American way of life, who sung about things he had never experienced, what did he see in him? And why the hell are we listening to ‘Jungleland’ for the hundredth time!

At the age of sixteen, I would have been happy if I never heard another Springsteen song again.

But then, at the ripe old age of seventeen, I experienced a deep bout of depression. There was no way out. My dad decided that him and I should have a weekend away together. Taking the weekend off sport, he drove us down south to Huskisson and Jervis Bay. I’ll be honest: The south coast is an incredibly beautiful place, but when you are a miserable seventeen year old, and your dad decides that a weekend at the beach in the middle of July (middle of winter for you northern folks) is what you need, you aren’t exactly the most grateful son. This is only hampered by the fact that your dad has just bought a boxset of the COMPLETE Springsteen and decides that that is what we are going to listen to the entire journey.

Physically cold, emotionally numb, and confronted by Springsteen’s fountains of hope, you do dream about the quiet solitude of your dirty stinking teenage boy room. Then, my dad asking what the next album in the series was, I pull out this black and white image with it’s gripping red lettering. No picture of Springsteen, no smiling faces, just the cold windscreen and the road stretching out into the grey clouded sky.

There is a before and after Nebraska. Before, I listened to music for raw power, violence, and the sound of a band playing as one. After that first listen, sitting there in the car, music meant something completely different to me. The violence was there, but it was murmuring away in another room. The power was overwhelming, but it wasn’t physical. The sound was of one man, sitting alone with a guitar, a harmonica, and his voice, not singing about hope and love and the ‘American Dream’ - whatever that is. It is about life. Tortured, repetitive, sad, wonderful, plodding life. I asked if we could listen to the album again. My dad smiled, and pressed play once more.

After the trip, I asked my dad if I could borrow the collection. I sat in my room in the dark listening to Springsteen with different ears. I heard things I’d never heard. I noticed lines I had never bothered to see. But I kept coming back to Nebraska. Nebraska, Nebraska, Nebraska. I wanted to soak myself in it, bathe in the way the sound feels a thousand miles deep yet balancing just on the surface. The stories, the characters are now my friends, the whole stinking lot of them. I would dream about listening to the album, again and again. It occupied my life. It now occupies a special place in my heart.

The title track, with its satellite harmonica beaming up through the palpable silence, sets the tone of the album beautifully. Springsteen himself has described Nebraska as “black bedtime stories”. In many ways, they are adult lullabies. Songs like ‘Mansion On The Hill’ and ‘My Father’s House’ sound centuries old. ‘State Trooper’ is the the first pulse of violence entering the world, and that howl, oh that howl. The forgotten lives of the everyday are elevated to gospel on ‘Reason To Believe’. In ‘Atlantic City’, Springsteen creates a melody so perfect that you nearly miss the tales he is spinning of people at a crossroads. Redemption is woven into the fabric of Nebraska through the songbook melodies, but these are not the stories of hope.

Along with Springsteen’s voice, guitar, and harmonic, the most striking aspect of Nebraska is its silence. Songs rise from a black pool, balancing a fine line between music and folktale. If you took away everything other than Springsteen’s voice, the silence that exists above and below his quiet howl would fill in the negative space.

“It needed that really kinda austere, echoey sound, just one guitar—one guy telling his story.” Springsteen doesn’t take a bird’s eye view of his characters, these down-on-their-luck, lonely, murderous, misguided people. He crawls into their skin, becoming them, seeing the world through their eyes. You forget there is a person outside of the characters. Springsteen becomes the mouthpiece for their confessions, and he inhabits his role as a prophet for the forgotten with care and respect.

The album was recorded on a four-track cassette. It is an album of demos, more-or-less. Springsteen passed the songs to the E-Street Band who didn’t know what to do with them, so he released them as is. Unfettered by his legacy, unafraid of how the songs would be received, he put the album out. I’ve read Springsteen’s autobiography. All 600 pages of it. I could see Nebraska was coming up. What would I learn? What would he tell me? What insights would he gift me that I didn’t already know from the days spent researching the album? I was ready to be enlightened.

Two pages. Two. Pages. He ends the chapter by basically saying, “Life went on”. To hell it did! My musical language ended at Nebraska. It was somehow both frustrating and comforting to know that this album, this perfect microcosm, just blossomed out of nothing and came into being. Nebraska is complete music, stripped of any pretence and fully formed, it came into the world as a snapshot of a time in Springsteen’s life and continues to sound bigger and brighter with every passing year.

Bruce Springsteen circa Nebraska. Credit: Rovi.

I like Jeremy Allen-White as much as the next guy, but I cannot picture him as The Boss. When they announced the biopic, Deliver Me from Nowhere, focusing on the period surrounding Nebraska, I couldn’t help but worry that the mystery of the record might become lost in the noise of a Hollywood film. Its unobtrusiveness is what makes it an outlier in Springsteen’s catalogue, and what makes it special. Where his music calls for communal release and looks towards the big emotions that define life, Nebraska begs to be hidden away. In a family of extroverts, it is the guy hiding in the back corner contemplating the bigger questions. Okay, that metaphor might be a push, but what I’m trying to say is the music doesn’t seek attention. You - the listener - come to Nebraska for a solo experience, not for a get-together.

Unlike many albums, I am very protective of Nebraska. I don’t want someone to touch or taint it. It is my album. Springsteen wrote it for me. But then again, knowing that this album could affect so many people; this strange, small, barely audible album, is what makes it, possibly, the most precious record in my life. Nebraska speaks to the individual. I know a number of people whose lives have been changed by this record, and it’s because we feel like it was made for us. Like an old friend, you never forget how to just fall back into place. Listening to Nebraska will always be a comfort.

Nebraska might not be the greatest album of all time. But to me, it is everything that music should be. It is my sacred text: raw, eternal, existing at the the beginning of things. If you want a reason to believe in music, unclip that CD of Nebraska and lose yourself for forty minutes, knowing that you will be home soon enough. Of the albums I know I can always turn to, Nebraska sits on the throne.

I continue to drive. I listen again. God knows how many times I’ve heard these songs. The highway is that little bit lighter. This time spent alone is now being spent with a dear friend, and that is time damn well spent.