One of the finest hours of an American music icon, Nebraska is about as harrowing as Bruce Springsteen’s output gets. It’s a (the?) prototypical post-success stylistic swerve, arriving as it did in the wake of The River, Springsteen’s first number-one album. Inspired by that record’s title track, as well as the music of Suicide, Springsteen dove headlong into darkly detailed storytelling about hard-luck characters carving out desperate lives on American society’s margins, saddled with “debts no honest man could pay.” He famously recorded the demos that would become Nebraska alone on a Tascam four-track, releasing them unaltered after they proved resistant to translation into full E Street Band songs. On the opening title track, Springsteen assumes the perspective of serial killer Charles Starkweather, observing matter-of-factly amid plucked acoustic guitar and mournful harmonica, “Well, sir, I guess there’s just a meanness in this world.” The point-of-view character in the indelible “Atlantic City” has everything to lose (and does); the stark “State Trooper”’s, nothing. Even as he closes out the album with a flicker of hope—”Still, at the end of every hard-earned day / People find some reason to believe”—Springsteen is haunted by the grim realities of American life (“Down here, it’s just winners and losers and ‘Don’t get caught on the wrong side of that line’”), as if unsure whether that hope is what keeps you alive, or what kills you. —Scott Russell
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