Nebraska

Everyone knows The Boss and his hits, but I doubt many people know of the early Bruce Springsteen album, Nebraska.  I remember telling my father I was getting into Bruce and he told me to stop everything I was doing and listen to Nebraska.  I did just that and my mind was blown; I couldn't believe it was Bruce.

The album is packed heavy with acoustic guitar and harmonica.  It truly embodies what an album called Nebraska would be.  Bruce recorded the albums on a cassette recorder originally as demos to be recorded with his band, The E-Street Band.  Bruce realized he liked the songs so much that he decided to release the demos as a full album.  The album is dark to put it lightly.  There are songs about blue-collar workers, crime, and murder.  Bruce wrote earnestly about the blue collared men of the mid west.  And he captured the mood so perfectly in the ten tracks on Nebraska.

Side one
No.	Title	Length
1.	"Nebraska"	4:32
2.	"Atlantic City"	4:00
3.	"Mansion on the Hill"	4:08
4.	"Johnny 99"	3:44
5.	"Highway Patrolman"	5:40
6.	"State Trooper"	3:17

Side two
No.	Title	Length
7.	"Used Cars"	3:11
8.	"Open All Night"	2:58
9.	"My Father's House"	5:07
10.	"Reason to Believe"	4:11

Springsteen said (about the album), "I was just doing songs for the next rock album, and I decided that what always took me so long in the studio was the writing. I would get in there, and I just wouldn't have the material written, or it wasn't written well enough, and so I'd record for a month, get a couple of things, go home write some more, record for another month — it wasn't very efficient. So this time, I got a little Teac four-track cassette machine, and I said, I'm gonna record these songs, and if they sound good with just me doin' 'em, then I'll teach 'em to the band. I could sing and play the guitar, and then I had two tracks to do somethin' else, like overdub a guitar or add a harmony. It was just gonna be a demo. Then I had a little Echoplex that I mixed through, and that was it. And that was the tape that became the record. It's amazing that it got there, 'cause I was carryin' that cassette around with me in my pocket without a case for a couple of week, just draggin' it around. Finally, we realized, "Uh-oh, that's the album." Technically, it was difficult to get it on a disc. The stuff was recorded so strangely, the needle would read a lot of distortion and wouldn't track in the wax. We almost had to release it as a cassette."

The album has become a cult favorite amongst Springsteen fans and music fans alike.  The song "Atlantic City" has been covered countless times and Johnny Cash covered two songs from this album on his own album, Johnny 99.  This album is a journey through the eyes of the lower class and the struggled faced .