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

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Springsteen told Zanes: “There was ‘Nebraska’ then there was this breakdown. So, yeah, it makes sense that you’d connect the two.” Maybe I was just in my own struggle, in my own head, and doing what I needed to get to the other side. It sounds like this was cathartic for you. In that moment in American life,” reflects musician and best-selling author Warren Zanes in the prologue of his fascinating making-of book, “it seemed you couldn’t turn on a radio without hearing Bruce Springsteen or buy a magazine without seeing him. But that wasn’t what mattered to us. Not right then. It wasn’t even the earlier records like Born to Run or Darkness on the Edge of Town that were on our minds, though we knew them line for line. When our dressing room door opened and Bruce Springsteen walked in, we had one thought: that’s the guy who made Nebraska.”

And then there was the road trip. As the curtain starts to fall on this epic journey, Springsteen begins to unravel as he heads to a new home in Los Angeles after the album’s release. Only after Landau suggested he seek professional help, did Springsteen start to realize he had really gone down a dark hole to hand over the heavy baggage of his complicated childhood. This book, more than any other, reveals the hidden corners of Bruce Springsteen’s creative world. It zeroes in on a period of both volatility and artistic breakthrough, when Springsteen made the record no one was asking for but that he was compelled to make. Warren Zanes, one of our very finest music writers, always comes from the place of the music and its maker. No one else could have told this story.” Judd ApatowIn Deliver Me from Nowhere: The Making of Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska, Warren Zanes tells how that cassette took on a life of its own when Springsteen decided to release the songs just as he recorded them. Zanes explains how Springsteen came to that moment, and the challenges involved in a major artist releasing an album he didn’t know he was making that only existed on a piece of technology that didn’t interface well with more sophisticated studio equipment. Even the technical aspects of making Nebraska into a physical, deliverable work of art were interesting as was Jon Landau’s role in the process as not only a manager, but as a friend. The reactions of other singer/songwriter performers to what Springsteen had done with Nebraska were also illuminating. Talking about it, I get choked up. “The Odyssey” has lasted because so many of us have these moments in our lives. As we’re being challenged, we’re also being built — but we don’t know it when it’s going down. His close friend and bandmate Steven Van Zandt could be that guy, the one who knew. But as a musician, he wanted to fashion a name for himself. Solo. Apart from the band. Springsteen in his way saw this as the opportunity to go inward and find something he had yet to see or fix.

Deliver Me from Nowhere by Warren Zanes is a fascinating look at both this superb album and the creative process in general, with plenty of input from Springsteen himself.

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PDF / EPUB File Name: Deliver_Me_from_Nowhere_-_Warren_Zanes.pdf, Deliver_Me_from_Nowhere_-_Warren_Zanes.epub According to himself, Bruce Springsteen is “a conceptual optimist yet a personal pessimist”. The duality has defined his entire career, and more often than not the light has prevailed. Only a supreme conceptual optimist could turn a song about depression into a glitter ball-friendly hit single. Yet there would have been no Dancing In The Dark without the preceding Nebraska, the one record where Bruce Springsteen admitted no light whatsoever. What a talent, what a career, what a life, and what a treat to relive it all with this most down-to-earth of demigods.