Nebraska as an album distills down to a trio of essential elements: sin, guilt, and consequence. Or maybe that's just my 10+ years of Catholic indoctrination muckying up my interpretation. Most songs here are narratives about how we live with the "debts that no honest man can pay," a line that circles back through several songs.
There is an undercurrent of determinism in many of the stories where the central character seems bound to commit an act of sin, whether accidentally, like hitting a dog on the highway in "Reason to Believe," or because "there's just a meanness in this world" in the album opener, "Nebraska," or because of a hard fact, "Franky ain't no good" in "Highway Patrolman," or due to a confluence of circumstances, "The bank was holdin' my mortgage and they were gonna take my house away," as Johnny 99 pleads. Like so many of Springsteen's previous songs, the characters feel trapped in their condition and see only one course of action left available.
We've heard from people desperate to escape, to drive away and leave their town and not "get caught on the wrong side of that line" before. "Hungry Heart", "Born to Run", "Thunder Road", maybe an entire side of singles from Bruce's last three records. But Nebraska is a departure from Springsteen's previous work because the songs are about criminals, rather than desperate though well-intentioned working class people. This gives the album an even darker tone than Darkness or River where the characters merely make intimations of committing crimes, and even then the crimes are drug deals or shady business deals. On Nebraska, the desperate become the killers.
Yet Springsteen fills these character sketches with such rich, believable voices and details their desperate circumstances so convincingly that it's hard not to pull for their redemption, even when their transgressions are unforgivable. He sets the standard high with "Nebraska," a song that slowly unfolds the true chronicle of Charles Starkweather, who, with his teenage girlfriend, went on a killing spree in '58 at the height of Eisenhower-era America. The killings were the basis for the brilliant 1973 film, Badlands, with Warren Beatty in the lead role.
Like Capote's attempt to know killer Perry Smith in such profound detail in order to be able to write about him for In Cold Blood, Springsteen sounds like he's spent a lot of time with his characters. What's powerful is his ability to allow the details of these characters and their situations to create an experience universal to listeners.
Ultimately, his characters are archetypes, embodiments in their song context of a question of the human condition. The "mythology" that critics praise him for creating is really bringing to flesh and song some of the deepest questions we face in life, such as 'what is honor'? 'what is belief'? In interviews, when Springsteen is in storyteller mode, he explains how a song asks these questions, but he doesn't answer them. He's smart enough to know that he doesn't have the answers, and humble enough not to try.
When you strip away the huge E Street Band sound, as Springsteen does on Nebraska, you get songs as stark as the midwest landscape. Out there, with no big drums to drive the songs, no screaming guitar solos to pound your heel to, and no sax or keys for atmosphere, the songs are left out in the sun to either thrive as a creature that is ready to adapt (as few others can), or wilt and be thrown to the vultures. It's a dangerous experiment for a whole album, though we've heard songs sound like these on the previous record, The River, with the title track as a great example. Largely, Nebraska is a creature that survives not in spite of the harsh recording setup but because of it.
I like the intimacy of Nebraska, the stifling closeness of his voice, and the position in which he's placed himself, one that he presages on "Darkness on the Edge of Town," with "Tonight I'll be on that hill 'cause I can't stop / I'll be on that hill with everything I got." That's the songwriter, his guitar and harmonica, and a few other instruments, and this is his High Noon. Nebraska is probably as close as Bruce will come to aligning himself directly with Dylan and Young.
As a songwriter who believes that the first and last songs on each side are crucial components of an album, Nebraska's last track, "Reason to Believe," is important to the whole album. "Reason" gives us a narrative of five scenarios wherein, against all odds, a person has a reason to trust that good things will happen. The narrator comments on each of these scenes "strikes [him] kinda funny," but nobody here is laughing.
In the first scenario, a man kills a dog on the highway, stops his car, gets out, and pokes the dog with a stick. There's a sense of guilt in this one. I see a guy who wants so badly to undo what he did accidentally in a presumably unavoidable situation. He was doing what he does -- driving down the highway like he's done a million times. But sin here is unavoidable. I don't get a necessarily Christian original sin reading here, but a basic truth that sometimes in life you do things that harm someone or something. You don't mean to do it, but there it is. And no amount of wishing or believing is going to undue it. You have to live with it.
In the next verses, we're presented with people who believe that by trying hard enough, things will work out right. Springsteen's voice is earnest in the telling, yet incredulous in his phrasing. Despite the somber topic, the song is no dirge. Instead, the song is an uptempo, acoustic gospel melody absent of gospel's typical themes of redemption, resolution, or real comfort. People here may find a reason to believe, but why they do is as much a mystery to the narrator as it is to us as listeners. All the way back on the second track, Atlantic City, there's the grave, "maybe everything that dies, someday comes back," which is sung with a desperate, almost tearful earnestness. In Reason to Believe, the same sentiment is practically laughed off the page.
I keep coming back to Nebraska, trying to find answers to its mysteries. Being so stripped down, I expect Bruce to be sitting down with me, telling me some truths about life. It's a personal sounding record, but he's actually more absent as a real person here than ever before. Instead, we get 10 stories, each full of characters brilliantly fleshed out, each exploring some question of how to live with sin, each totally missing Springsteen speaking from the "I", which is as troubling as the question he silently asks: how do we live with ourselves this long life?
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