Heart Of Darkness: Bruce Springsteen's Nebraska

In January, 1982, Bruce Springsteen recorded a bunch of demos on a four-track unit in his New Jersey home. They were intended as templates for the follow-up to his blockbusting double set, The River. Instead, ten of the songs became Nebraska, a stark soundtrack to an economic downturn in America not seen since the Great Depression, a kind of noir album that evoked the southern gothic literature of Flannery O’Connor and invoked the ghost of fifties’ serial killer Charles Starkweather.

In Heart Of Darkness: Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska, published by Cherry Red in October, 2011, David Burke evaluates its American folk roots, places it in the context of Springsteen’s entire body of work and hears from a generation of artists who cite it as a major influence.