Open All Night

Springsteen wrote it and plays a Chuck Berry-style electric riff, the only electric guitar on Nebraska; it was inspired by a short story by the novelist William Price Fox. The narrator drives all night across industrial New Jersey, up the Turnpike, to Wanda, a former waitress at a Bob's Big Boy on Route 60. The song page gives June 23, 1982 for the recording while the album page puts the demos between December 1981 and January 1982, and we could not resolve the two. A European single came out on November 22, 1982 with "The Big Payback" on the B-side. It reached 22 on Mainstream Rock and never charted in the UK.

It was rare in concert until the 2006 Seeger Sessions tour, where it became an eight-minute show-stopping rave-up with a big-band swing arrangement. Jay Farrar of Son Volt covered it in 2005 and Pearl Jam played it in Lincoln, Nebraska in November 2014. Our upload is the previously unreleased full-band take on the Electric Nebraska disc of Nebraska '82: Expanded Edition (October 24, 2025); Sony also released a live version from the Count Basie Theatre as a single on September 25, 2025.