Nebraska ’82: Expanded Edition

Bruce Springsteen was right. At the risk of oversimplifying the merits of this handsome box set, spoiling the plot of his dramatic new biopic, and squashing 40-plus years of fervent mythmaking, the truth is as Springsteen always insisted. Even when testing out the material with his most intuitive collaborators, working with some of the best songs he’d ever written, the definitive version of Nebraska remains the one he captured on tape in his Colts Neck home in January 1982: just a depressive guy in his early 30s with an acoustic guitar, a TASCAM PortaStudio, and an Echoplex, tracking solo demos for his next full-band record. Everything he tried in the following months, as it turns out, was an experiment.

But, lord, what an experiment. For the uninitiated, I’ll go through it quickly. After the success of his poppy 1980 single “Hungry Heart” and building off the momentum of several years of nonstop touring and critically acclaimed albums, Springsteen entered the most creatively restless period of his career. First, he wrote the murder ballads and haunted lullabies of Nebraska, which he tried to re-capture with the E Street Band, and in solo renditions in the studio, before deciding to release the home-recorded demos. There was no press and no tour, so he just kept writing, which led to 1984’s commercial breakthrough Born in the U.S.A. Along the way, he discarded several records’ worth of outtakes that have since been released on compilations like Tracks and Tracks II: The Lost Albums. (He also managed to co-write and co-produce two comeback records for the early rock’n’roll icon Gary U.S. Bonds; contribute a Grammy-winning song to Donna Summer; and put on several pounds of muscle mass.)

It sounds like a golden era, but to Bruce, it felt like a rut—the kind of tortured, lonesome period that gets a ceaselessly brooding Jeremy Allen White cast to play you in the film. The irony is that the most important pieces of the puzzle—from the original Nebraska to the lightning-in-a-bottle album version of “Born in the U.S.A.”—all happened quickly, intuitively, before anyone had a chance to overcomplicate things. Like little else in his official catalog, the release of Nebraska 82: Expanded Edition helps contextualize this moment. In a concise package, you get a fuller portrait of one of Springsteen’s greatest and most mysterious albums—and to this day, the one he’s proudest of—as well as candid insight into his creative process.

The box contains a new remaster of the album proper; a disc of solo acoustic outtakes that embody the same wounded spirit; the fabled Electric Nebraska sessions; and a live album and film of Springsteen playing the record in its entirety to an empty theater in New Jersey earlier this year. The live stuff is welcome and fittingly reverential, especially with tasteful accompaniment from former Bob Dylan sideman Larry Campbell. The remaster is solid: a reminder that, despite this album’s reputation for helping pioneer the lo-fi genre, the sound is actually more artful and dynamic than much of his work that followed. Next time you listen to “Atlantic City” on headphones, pay attention to the last 30 seconds, how the layers of acoustic guitar, mandolin, and background vocals slowly dissipate, one at a time, and consider the care that goes into adding such depth to such a stark landscape.

Unlike Springsteen’s previous box sets for Darkness on the Edge of Town and The River, the idea isn’t to explore how many different directions he could have gone. This time it’s a steady process of refinement. Where Nebraska is renowned for a borderline oppressive consistency in tone, Electric Nebraska is all about the whiplash, shifting between heartland ballads and screaming rock songs across the duration of its eight-song tracklist. Presented more like guide tracks than finished takes—mostly just Springsteen on electric guitar and vocals; Max Weinberg on drums; and Garry Tallant on bass—these are the ones that feel like demos, even if they hint at an album that could have been slightly more conventional and commercially viable in 1982. (Although this version of “Downbound Train,” with its clanging rhythm and disorienting bridge, might go down as the most deranged recording in his catalog.)

It’s not hard to see why Springsteen saw these sessions as a failure. There is something slightly generic about the renditions of “Open All Night” and “Johnny 99,” songs I’ve always associated with desperate, sleep-deprived adrenaline. Here they sound like the kind of things a band could count off and launch into unrehearsed with playful bar-band chords and rockabilly rhythms. On one hand, it shows you just how much Springsteen’s writing—so open to interpretation, so archetypal in its structure—gains from his delivery. (For another example, compare this bleak, early acoustic take on “Thunder Road” to the triumphant album version.) On the other hand, this type of costuming was crucial to his songwriting during this period: a fascination that could turn a romp like “Pink Cadillac” into something pained and moaning, like the narrator has returned to earth, zombified and broken, with only one thing on his mind.

For hardcore fans, transformations like these will be the draw of the collection: hearing the journey of tracks like Born in the U.S.A.’s “Working on a Highway” from a genuinely creepy ballad called “Child Bride” into a ditty so raucous that Springsteen himself can’t get through the demo without laughing. Some outtakes, like “Losin’ Kind,” a country ballad that’s all the more powerful for its lack of resolution, have circulated unofficially for years, but two compositions are entirely new to this box set: “On the Prowl” and “Gun in Every Home.” In the former, he closes with a disorienting repetition of the word “searching,” slathered in Sun Studios slapback delay to conjure the clatter of a live band behind him. In the latter, he offers a nightmarish portrait of suburban life and closes with a dejected confession: “I don’t know what to do.”

In any given song, Springsteen may be adopting the perspective of a serial killer in the shadows or a fugitive on the lam; he may be speeding away from the scene or wondering, upon getting caught, whether he is actually lucky to be alive. The whole point of enduring a dark night of the soul is that you can’t see your way out. But sometimes, he caught glimpses of where it would lead. Along with the original demo tape, Springsteen wrote an accompanying letter to his manager, Jon Landau. Here, he goes song by song, elaborating on the bleak subject matter, suggesting ways to spice up the arrangements, and, once in a while, acknowledging his cautious optimism.

He leaves a particularly prescient note beside the scrawled title of “Born in the U.S.A.,” a song that appears here in two nascent forms: a menacing acoustic blues about Vietnam and a full-band rocker that, without its chiming synth part, leaves little doubt how the narrator feels about his birthright. “Might have potential,” he writes in the margins, an instinct that sustained him through the sessions. He knew it would take work to deliver songs like these, and it would take time to understand them. But he kept his faith that at the end of every hard-earned day, there’s magic in the night.

Bruce Springsteen: Nebraska ’82: Expanded Edition

$130 at Rough Trade

$130 at Amazon