Nebraska

The song is sung in the first person by Charles Starkweather, who with his teenage girlfriend Caril Ann Fugate went on a killing spree across Nebraska and Wyoming in 1957 and 1958. Springsteen wrote it after seeing Terrence Malick's Badlands on television, taking the opening image of a girl twirling a baton from the film, and he read Ninette Beaver's book Caril and spoke to Beaver herself. Its last line, about the meanness in the world, echoes Flannery O'Connor's A Good Man Is Hard to Find. He later said that everyone knows what it is like to be condemned.

It was the first song recorded at Colts Neck and gave the album its name, after early lists called it Starkweather. Springsteen played every part, and the fourth of six full takes became the album version. The band tried it at the Power Station in April 1982, and that version finally came out on Electric Nebraska in 2025. Steve Pond found the music gentle, even soothing. It was never a single.

Live

He first played it on the second night of the Born in the U.S.A. Tour, in St. Paul on 1 July 1984, and has played it 116 times, most often on the solo Ghost of Tom Joad Tour. He sang it in 2023 in the Colts Neck farmhouse where it was made, for CBS Sunday Morning. Steve Earle, Chrissie Hynde, Aoife O'Donovan, Ryan Adams and Jeremy Allen White have recorded it. The upload in the hypersongs web is the 1982 album recording.