“All truth is comprised in music and mathematics.” Margaret Fuller
Nebraska (1982) isn't a Springsteen album I've groked, so when I saw this article which gave some background, I played it a few times to begin to understand the artistry of one of Rock and Roll's great artists.
"Flannery O’Connor trusted that her readers could see in her grotesques something more. Her fiction, and her Catholicism, hinged on that. Though Springsteen didn’t work with what could be called grotesques, he did create characters caught in their own blocks of stone. Nebraska closes on “Reason to Believe,” which might be summarized thus: there isn’t one. “It’s a common misinterpretation of ‘Reason to Believe,’ that it’s a hopeful song,” Springsteen told me. “It’s hard to find a basis for that misinterpretation. I suppose the title does it. But it was one of the darkest songs on the record and it was the way I decided to finish that album. In that density.” It might have been O’Connor who let Springsteen know that he could end right there and his listeners would, hopefully, know what to do with it."
I was already tired of Born to Run when the classic rock station I grew up with, overplayed it. But when my first wife had a lot of Springsteen albums, I got to really like Rosalita. I would come home from working as a dishwasher, and put on that song, and when it said to, "jump a little lighter," I would feel work worries lift off, and it was the perfect transition for that time in my life. I begin to see the album through the eyes of a woman who grew up in Stoke-on-Trent.
Bruce Springsteen was born in 1949 in Long Beach New Jersey. The mutt had Dutch, Irish and Italian heritage. Springsteen means in Dutch "stepping stone". He said his faith had given him a "very active spiritual life" but joked that this "made it very difficult sexually" and added "once a Catholic, always a Catholic". He graduated high school in 1967, went to college, and was rejected when drafted because he'd had a concussion 2 years earlier in a motorcycle accident. He was inspired by Sinatra, Elvis and the Beatles on TV. His first band was called The Rogues and they played at the Elks Lodge. 1964 his mother took out a loan to buy him a $60 Kent guitar, an act he later memorialized in his song "The Wish". His next band was called The Castiles. They played in Cafe Wha? in the Village. His next band was called Earth. Then the next band was called Child, later called Steel Mill, which started playing regularly at the Stone Pony. He performed with Dr. Zoom & the Sonic Boom in 1971, then formed Bruce Springsteen Band. In 1972 he performed for John Hammond of Columbia Records. His nickname The Boss came from playing Monopoly.
Studio albums:
Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J. (1973)The Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle (1973)
Born to Run (1975)
Darkness on the Edge of Town (1978)
The River (1980)
Nebraska (1982)
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