State Trooper

Springsteen wrote it and recorded it alone, on guitar and vocals, on a four-track TEAC Portastudio at his home in Colts Neck, New Jersey, between December 17, 1981 and January 3, 1982. It is a lo-fi folk song with a guitar line that evokes the sound of the road, and Wikipedia says it was directly influenced by Suicide's "Frankie Teardrop"; the narrator is a car thief with no license or registration, growing paranoid on a deserted highway at night. Nebraska came out on September 30, 1982 on Columbia (MusicBrainz shows September 20) and reached number 3 on the US chart.

It is rarely played. Rolling Stone reported that a 2008 performance in Ottawa on the Magic tour, with members of Arcade Fire, was the first E Street Band performance since the Born in the U.S.A. tour, more than twenty years earlier. Our upload is the live solo take on disc three of Nebraska '82: Expanded Edition (Sony/Columbia, October 24, 2025), filmed by Thom Zimny at the Count Basie Theatre in Red Bank, New Jersey with no audience and with Larry Campbell and Charlie Giordano accompanying lightly. We found no covers.