Music
30 Sep 25

On this day in 1982: Bruce Springsteen released Nebraska

On this day in 1982: Bruce Springsteen released <i>Nebraska</i>

Photo: David Michael Kennedy

On September 30, 1982, Bruce Springsteen defied expectations with the release of his stripped-back sixth album, Nebraska. Featuring classics like 'Atlantic City', 'My Father's House', and 'Open All Night', Nebraska has since been listed among the greatest albums of all time – and its creation is set to be chronicled in the upcoming feature film, Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere. To mark its anniversary, we're sharing some special reflections on the album – all selected from Hot Press interviews.

Bono:

"I believed the reason it was successful was the fragile quality of the music. There were tones and textures in the acoustic guitar and mouth organ – an intimacy that people hadn't heard for a while. All they'd heard was that snare drum – bash! bash!

"There's an incredible power to those reedy instruments... There's a timelessness there. In an era when the hands of the clock are sweeping by so fast, there's a timelessness to those sounds that I'm interested in."

Read the full 1983 interview here.

Emmylou Harris:

"...that was another kind of Luke The Drifter/Woody Guthrie picking-up-the-mantle-of-the-common-man folk song album, but it also had songs about relationships like 'My Father's House', that primordial swamp in there.

"It doesn't matter how good or bad a relationship you have with your father, there's sorrow in that song. Even when my father was still alive there was something about it, it was like a dream that I'd had that I didn't remember until I'd heard that song."

Read the full 1997 interview here.

David Gray:

"Culturally, on one level, I think [America is] a bit grim. But then you just look at all the amazing music that comes out of here. The folk music here, which is what I'm really into, is brilliant – records like Nebraska or stuff by Hank Williams or Johnny Cash. There is a sort of ache at the centre of the music."

Read the full 2000 interview here.

Niall Stokes - Critics Round-Up 1982:

"...Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska also deserves to be singled out – no other songwriter captured the global malaise of ’82 so starkly, so effectively. This is an album to inspire a fearful chill, conveying as it does such a creeping feeling of desperation. Staring into the fire at 3 a.m. of a winter nights its morbid vignettes bring it all back home. Desolation row."

Read his full Critics Round-Up 1982 here.