Nebraska

Springsteen recorded the songs in his bedroom on a TEAC Portastudio that his guitar technician Mike Batlan had bought, with two microphones, an acoustic guitar and a few overdubs of harmonica, mandolin and glockenspiel. The cassette was meant for the E Street Band, but two weeks of full-band sessions at the Power Station in April 1982 did not satisfy him or his co-producers, and he carried the tape around in his jeans pocket. Van Zandt told him that never meaning to release it was what made it so intimate. The quiet tape was hard to master, and several engineers tried before Dennis King at Atlantic Studios succeeded.

The songs drew on Flannery O'Connor, the films Badlands and The Grapes of Wrath, and the noir of James M. Cain and Jim Thompson. Released with no tour and no interviews, it still reached number three in America and Britain. Robert Hilburn compared its boldness to John Lennon's Plastic Ono Band, and Pitchfork gave it ten. Springsteen said in 2023 that it was the album he would choose to represent him. In 2025 Nebraska '82 added the band sessions, outtakes and a new filmed performance.