内布拉斯加 (1982)

Nebraska is the sixth studio album by the American singer-songwriter Bruce Springsteen, released on September 30, 1982, through Columbia Records. Springsteen recorded the songs unaccompanied on a four-track recorder in the bedroom of his home in Colts Neck, New Jersey. He had intended to rerecord the tracks with the E Street Band but decided to release them as they were, after deeming the full-band renditions to be unsatisfactory. The tape contained 17 songs, of which 10 were used for Nebraska; the others appeared in full-band renditions on the follow-up album Born in the U.S.A. (1984) or as B-sides.

Living isolated in Colts Neck, Springsteen was influenced by folk music, American literature, and film when writing the lyrics. The short stories of Flannery O'Connor particularly inspired him to write about his childhood memories. The album contains a stark, lo-fi sound, as the tracks tell the stories of blue-collar workers who try to succeed in life but fail at every turn, while searching for a deliverance that never comes. Some of the lyrics are in the voice of outlaws and criminals, including the killer Charles Starkweather on the title track. The album's artwork is a 1975 photograph by David Michael Kennedy which depicts a black-top road under a cloudy sky through the windshield of a car.

Nebraska stylistically stood apart from other releases in 1982. Commercially, it charted within the top 10 in Australia, Canada, Japan, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States. The album was accompanied by two European singles—"Atlantic City" and "Open All Night"; the former supported by Springsteen's first music video. He did not do promotional work for the record, believing listeners should experience it for themselves. Critics praised the album as brave and artistically daring, considering it Springsteen's most personal record up to that point. Negative reviews felt that the songs stylistically merged, and their dark themes would appeal only to fans. The album appeared on several year-end lists.

Retrospectively, critics regard Nebraska as a timeless record and one of Springsteen's finest works. The album has appeared on numerous lists of the greatest albums of all time. It is recognized as one of the first do it yourself (DIY) home recordings by a major artist and has had a significant influence on the indie rock and underground music scenes. Numerous artists have paid tribute to the album and have cited its impact on their music. A biographical film based on the album's creation, titled Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere, was released on October 24, 2025. An expanded edition of the album, featuring Electric Nebraska, was released the same day.

Background and development

Bruce Springsteen's fifth studio album The River (1980) was his most commercially successful album to that point. However, the newfound media attention from the album and The River Tour supporting it led him to reconsider his role as an artist. He explained that The River's success led to "very conflicted feelings about being so separate from the people that I'd grown up around and that I wrote about". At the end of the tour, he retreated to his newly-rented ranch in Colts Neck, New Jersey, in September 1981.

Living in rural Colts Neck, Springsteen immersed himself in American history, books and film in search of stories to use for his songs. He read books such as Joe Klein's Woody Guthrie: A Life (1980), Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States (1980), Allan Nevins and Henry Steele Commager's A Pocket History of the United States, and Ron Kovic's autobiography Born on the Fourth of July (1976). He was inspired by films such as John Ford's adaptation of The Grapes of Wrath (1940), Terrence Malick's Badlands (1973), John Huston's adaptation of Wise Blood (1979), and Ulu Grosbard's True Confessions (1981). Springsteen reflected on his childhood and studied the romans noirs (dark crime novels) of James M. Cain and Jim Thompson, the Southern Gothic short stories of Flannery O'Connor and the music of Guthrie, Bob Dylan, and Hank Williams. PopMatters's Bill See says that from these sources, Springsteen retrieved "a humanity and a curiosity about why certain people lose connection with themselves, their families, their community, [and] their government".