Deliver Me from Nowhere

Description

The fascinating story behind the making of Bruce Springsteen's most surprising album, Nebraska, revealing its pivotal role in Springsteen's career Without Nebraska, Bruce Springsteen might not be who he is today. The natural follow-up to Springsteen's hugely successful The River should have been the hit-packed album Born in the U.S.A, but instead, in 1982, he came out with Nebraska, an album consisting of a series of dark songs he had recorded exclusively by himself, for himself. But almost forty years later, Nebraska is arguably Springsteen's most important record--the lasting clue if you're looking to understand not just the artist's career and the vision behind it but the man himself. Nebraska is rough and unfinished, recorded on a cassette tape with a simple four-track recorder by Springsteen, alone in his bedroom, just as the digital future was announcing itself. And yet Springsteen now considers it his best album. Nebraska expressed a turmoil that was reflective of a mood in the country but was also a symptom of trouble in the artist's life, the beginnings of a mental breakdown that Springsteen would only talk about openly decades after the album's release. Warren Zanes spoke to many people involved with making Nebraska, including Bruce Springsteen. He also interviewed more than a dozen celebrated artists, from Rosanne Cash to Steven Van Zandt, about their reaction to the album. He interweaves these conversations with inquiries into the myriad cultural touchpoints, including Terence Malick's Badlands, that influenced Springsteen as he was writing the album's haunting songs. The result is a textured and revelatory account of not only a crucial moment in the career of an icon but also a recording that upended all expectations and predicted a home recording revolution.

Warren Zanes is the New York Times bestselling author of Petty- The Biography. He holds a PhD in visual and cultural studies from the University of Rochester. He played alongside Springsteen when he was a member of the Del Fuegos, and continues to record music. He is a Grammy-nominated producer of the PBS series Soundbreaking and a consulting producer on the Oscar-winning Twenty Feet from Stardom. His work has appeared in Rolling Stone and The Oxford American, and he has served as a VP at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and presently teaches at New York University.

"Warren Zanes is in possession of a genuine, often astonishing writerly gift. This book is about Bruce Springsteen's weird, gothic, heartbroken 1982 left turn, Nebraska, which is not just a startling swerve in the career of a great American artist or a pivotal yet neglected transitional moment in the history of recorded music, but the question Springsteen asked himself forty years ago: What do you do when you begin to understand that the things you have loved most have begun to do you harm? This is some of Zanes's best writing ever, which is saying a lot."-Michael Chabon, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The AmazingAdventures of Kavalier & Clay "Zanes has emerged from the wilderness of Nebraska with one of the greatest books about the creative process ever written. By focusing on Springsteen's dark masterpiece and the soil it emerged from, Zanes elevates it to near mythic stature. Deliver Me from Nowhere is profoundly felt, deeply understood, and (as it should be) full of joy and abandon-with a hint of menace."-Nick Flynn, author of Another Bullshit Night in Suck City "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 Apatow "You can waste your access by protecting your subject or trying to get too pretty. Warren Zanes does neither. He honors the access he gets to all of his central characters. If you're a writer, his gift will make you jealous. But not jealous enough to stop reading. This is the Springsteen book we've been waiting for."-Geoff Edgers, national arts reporter for The Washington Post and author of Walk This Way: Run-DMC, Aerosmith, and the Song that Changed American Music Forever