126 - Bruce Springsteen's Nebraska with Warren Zanes

126 - Bruce Springsteen's Nebraska with Warren Zanes

Author: Rock n Roll Book Club July 27, 2026 Duration: 1:04:56

Join us for a deep dive into Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska with writer Warren Zanes, author of Deliver Me From Nowhere which was recently made into a Hollywood movie. 


In late 1981 Bruce Springsteen is coming off his biggest success to date with The River album & tour plus his first hit single, Hungry Heart. 


But rather than offer more of the same Springsteen offers a curveball - a quiet, almost ghostly sounding record with no hit singles, no tour & not even any interviews to support it. 


Springsteen had recently relocated to a house in Colts Neck, New Jersey, where he recorded the bulk of the album on the evening of January 3rd 1982 on a TEAC 144 home recorder. 


Influenced by the films of Terence Malick, specifically Badlands, the writing of Flannery O’Connor & the first couple of Suicide albums, Springsteen recorded what were intended as home demos in a bedroom. 


Later attempts to re-record the material with the E Street Band proved largely fruitless & they eventually went back to the original water damaged cassette recording, which was released as the finished album. 


The album proved hugely influential to the likes of Steve Earle & Matt Berninger (The National) & even Johnny Cash recorded two of its tracks. 

 


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Hosted, Produced & Edited by Simon Cardwell

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The Music Maps Podcast from the Rock n Roll Book Club isn't your typical music show. It's an audio expedition where geography is the guide. Every episode starts with a specific location-a city, a venue, a forgotten roadside attraction-and uses that place as a launchpad to explore the sounds, stories, and scenes connected to it. You might find yourself deep in the blues clubs of Chicago one week and tracing the underground punk threads of a small European town the next. The conversations are wide-ranging, connecting the dots between iconic artists and obscure movements, all anchored to a point on the map. Listening to this podcast feels like adding a new, richly detailed pin to a global atlas of musical influence. It’s about the context behind the chords and the cultural soil from which genres grow. The result is a continuously evolving, deeply human portrait of how music and place are inextricably linked, one fascinating destination at a time.
Author: Language: English Episodes: 50

Music Maps Podcast
Podcast Episodes
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