Nebraska

• It's not a record, it's a demo!
• Springsteen recorded the songs as demos on a 4-track recorder at home in New Jersey.
• • After completing work on the demos, in April, 1982 Springsteen took the compact audio cassette tape to the studio to work on rock versions of the songs with the E Street Band; these sessions are commonly referred to as "the Electric Nebraska Sessions".
  • Certain songs were too personal, and the raw, haunting folk essence present on the compact cassette tape could not be duplicated in the band treatments.
  • However, eight of the 12 tracks that went on the 1984 album Born in the U.S.A. were composed of "Electric Nebraska" success stories.
  • Despite common agreement that releasing the demo versions was the right decision, Springsteen fans have long speculated whether the full-band recordings will ever surface.
• He decided to release the demos as they were, leading to the unique sound of the album.
• The demo recording sessions that produced the album actually covered several days, but January 3, 1982, is credited as the "legendary night" when 15 tracks were recorded.
• Springsteen carried the cassette around uncased for weeks and had he lost or damaged it, this album wouldn't exist.
• Country music icon Johnny Cash covered songs from 'Nebraska' on his album 'Johnny 99'.
• Springsteen chose not to tour in support of the album, making it his first major release without tour support.
• The songs on Nebraska deal with ordinary, down-on-their-luck blue-collar characters who face a challenge or a turning point in their lives. The songs also address the subject of outsiders, criminals and mass murderers with little hope for the future—or no future at all.
• On December 7, 2022, singer-songwriter Ryan Adams released a full track-by-track cover of the album. It has not been well received.

Without Nebraska, Bruce Springsteen might not be who he is today. The natural follow-up to Springsteen’s hugely successful album The River should have been the hit-packed Born in the U.S.A. But instead, in 1982, he came out with an album consisting of a series of dark songs he had recorded by himself, for himself. But more than forty years later, Nebraska is arguably Springsteen’s most important record—the lasting clue to understanding not just his career as an artist and the vision behind it, but also the man himself.
 
Nebraska is rough and unfinished, recorded on cassette tape with a simple four-track recorder by Springsteen, alone in his bedroom, just as the digital future was announcing itself. And yet Springsteen now considers it his best album. Nebraska expressed a turmoil that was reflective of the mood of the country, but it was also a symptom of trouble in the artist’s life, the beginnings of a mental breakdown that Springsteen would only talk about openly decades after the album’s release.

- From the book description of "Deliver Me from Nowhere: The Making of Bruce Springsteen's Nebraska" by Warren Zanes