I’ve had a lot on my mind of late, so much so it can be hard to find the right balance between processing emotion and thinking about life, in all its overwhelming logistics and complications. One always seemed to lean into another and before long I’m left gasping for air trying to kick my way up out of an ocean of fear and uncertainty. But this is all an innate part of progressing through life; pushing yourself out of your comfort zone, meeting resistance, but powering through so you can grow and move on to the next stage of your existence. Through all of this I’ve been spending a lot of time with Bruce Springsteen. The intimacy and vulnerability of his lyrics make way for rock n roll that truly connects. I find that, in the enrapturing tales of adversity and perseverance that Springsteen can craft with such rustic authenticity, when that sax or guitar solo comes ripping through your speakers, it’s all the more triumphant. As a person going through the turbulent motions of life, I’ve been listening a lot to Darkness on the Edge of Town. However, as a songwriter, I can’t stop thinking about Nebraska.
For a little context, Nebraska by Bruce Springsteen was the follow-up to his monumental double album The River, his biggest and fastest selling album to that date. With conservatism in America on the rise, along with new digital recording techniques and the rise of MTV, a feeling was stirring in the nation’s listeners that rock was moving away from its original, reckless spirit. Springsteen was looked to as a bastion, rock n roll’s guardian; all eyes were on what he would do next. He receded into isolation. He’d lost the big farmhouse he shared with his band mates and all their partners, and had himself just left a relationship. ‘It was a strange moment. I came off the River Tour and I felt that hollowness. [...] Houseless and clueless about where to turn next, I decided to lose myself in the marginally more controllable terrain of my musical life. With the spiderweb of my past gumming up my works, I turned to a world I’d walked through as a child, remained on familiar terms with and heard calling to me now.’
Bruce wrote upwards of eighty songs for The River, much of this material being workshopped with his band in the studio. The time it took to sift through all the music he was writing to find the eventual album track listing meant the majority of the money he was making off his success went to paying studio fees. Trying to regain control over his life and his finances resulted in Nebraska, an album recorded in one room of an empty house, onto a four track tape recorder. Always interested in Freudian analysis, the lyrics from this album tended to be from a child’s perspective, the narratives and characters explored were Bruce’s way of uncovering a part of himself that had been buried in the noise of pursuing his prolific career. The result was haunting and intimately personal. With his band eliminated from this stage of the writing process, his songs could address parts of himself he couldn’t expose with others in the room.
I think about this often, when I think of the power of putting feeling to verse, or any kind of expression. The ‘spiderweb of my past’ Bruce refers to is an apt metaphor, we are often lost in an interconnected web of anxieties and concerns, it’s too much for us to really sit with and work through just in our heads. Through the abstraction of poetry we can boil it all down to what really matters to us. There’s an inherent performative aspect to songwriting that requires attention paid to key moments of impact, synthesised through lyrics, music and vocal delivery. The process requires drawing attention to the specific pivot points where the intensity can swell. Either consciously or subconsciously we are zooming in on the specifics of our emotions. When crafting something like this, you’re starting with nothing, freefalling through infinite variables to sculpt a song out of thin air. However, and I can only really speak for myself here, things can fall into place rather intuitively. When my songwriting is at its most productive, I don’t feel like a sculptor, I feel like I’m in a clearing, lit barely by moonlight, swinging a net for butterflies and putting them in jars. Wherever I swing is wherever it feels right, and I never seem to have much agency in the process. If you’ve had something on your mind, even if you don’t sit down to write about those specific concerns, they usually appear regardless. I lack internality in my day to day life, I used to manifest my anxieties in twitches and dreams, now I manifest them in song. Many times I won’t realise what I was actually writing about until months down the line, and it can make you feel a little exposed to play those songs to others. At the end of the day, therapy ain’t cheap, and there’s only so much you can unload on your friends and family when the only person who can see and understand every shade and angle of your soul, is you.
Springsteen’s Nebraska was not what anyone expected, but it pops up in interviews often as the album he is the most proud of and that he feels will still endure in a hundred years. It has frequently been cited as an influence to many of the truly fresh and exciting songwriters that came after. Through all the noise of lush and bombastic production, it’s the soul of a song that resonates and stays with listeners the most, and how else can you connect with listeners in this way until you connect with yourself? I’ve seen songwriters try hide their true feelings behind the abstractions in their lyrics, I've been guilty of the same thing, and it’s a thin line between honesty and overbearing which only a minority will ever find. As with all things, it’s the act of doing that really counts, and just sitting down to process things through art is perhaps the most stabilising experience I know.. As popular culture steps further and further away from sincerity, I think it’s more crucial than ever to expose yourself a little in what you create. It may be scary, but I have no doubt that Nebraska has made many feel a little less alone, and brought a great deal of comfort to someone struggling to dig into their own dirt for the pain and the trauma that hangs like a shroud on their life.
I’d like to end on some fragments from a review for a short film by Jonas Mekas, ‘Song of Avignon’, written by the user kailey on Letterboxd.com;
‘what is the point of art? i do not know jonas mekas. i have not lived his life. these are not my memories, my monologue, my children or my spouse or my parents. this is catharsis for him and for him alone. why do we spend our time watching stories that are not our own? what is our fascination with hands we will never touch? [...] i think sometimes (in my lowest moments) that my own dark hole and that flat voice in my head, asking me if this is all really worth it, are singular. they exist for me and for only me. what is the point of art? i don't know. for eight minutes, i felt like i was not alone.’
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