Bruce Springsteen ‘Nebraska ’82’ Offers Valuable Vault Material: Review

Boxed sets celebrating classic rock albums offer the joy of discovery, in all those abandoned alternate versions being brought into the light as bonus tracks, but usually also some simultaneous historical relief: How interesting these early arrangements sound… and thank God they didn’t ultimately get stuck there. In all those Beatles early takes you can almost always pick out something that didn’t quite work, that they found a way to fix for the better at the last minute. For the most part, though, Bruce Springsteen’s “Nebraska ’82: Expanded Edition” isn’t like that. Hearing all the different versions of songs that appeared on “Nebraska” or his next album, “Born in the U.S.A.,” there’s rarely any sense of “Glad that road was not taken.” Nearly all the alternate takes put on view here are pretty great; it’s easy to start imagining a multiverse with completely different versions of “Nebraska” nearly as wonderful as the one we got 43 years ago.

What those theoretical other versions wouldn’t have been, though, is influential — or at least impactful enough that somebody would have been making a feature film about them in 2025. In the run-up to Scott Cooper’s “Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere,” some wild claims have been made for the homemade, rough-hewn “Nebraska,” like: Bruce invented lo-fi! Not quite, but in spirit, close enough. In 1982, there was not yet a four-track cassette demo machine in every garage; “Unplugged” had not yet been invented; synths and garish, gated drum sounds were on the way in … and not many arena rockers were thinking, “How can I make a record that sounds like ‘Folkways meets Sun Studios’ — but with more murder?” Springsteen made a stripped-down aesthetic something that could forever after be defended in a corporate suite (if not always as successfully as in the slightly corny Columbia Records scenes in “Nowhere”). He made a record that didn’t just have edgy lyrics but sounded like someone cut a six-inch valley through the middle of his skull, to borrow a phrase.

Ultimately, we wouldn’t have wanted “Nebraska” any other way — but listening to the two discs of outtakes in this new set, you get glimpses of how it could have been executed differently and perhaps turned out just about as good, just not as culture-rattling. The most long-awaited component here is the disc labeled “Electric Nebraska,” which offers band versions of six songs that wound up as solo tracks on “Nebraska,” plus two that would go the opposite way and wind up bigger and slicker when finally heard on “Born in the USA.” The disc titled “Nebraska Outtakes,” meanwhile, includes solo recordings of nine compositions that didn’t make it onto “Nebraska,” making the case it could’ve been a terrific double-LP.

Buyers also get two other discs: One is a remastering of the original album (given the aesthetic here, wouldn’t a de-mastering seem more apropos?). The other is a decent enough live performance of the album’s tracks filmed in stark (Starkweather?) B&W for Blu-Ray by longtime collaborator Thom Zimny. Springsteen went into the Count Basie Theatre in New Jersey to do this new rendering, joined in the subtlest possible way by two sidemen whose contributions are so slight, they’re practically sidelined. (Although these extra players are not as ghostly as the audience — there isn’t any.) It’s worth a look and a listen, to hear that material presented with a voice weathered by another 43 years, although the fandom would have found it more intriguing to see that stage overtaken by the E Street Band for an entire set of fresh rearrangements, not a replication of the original album with extra rasp. Anyway, better to hear Springsteen reinhabit these songs in the style to which everyone has become accustomed than not get a contemporary take at all.

But what you are really here for is the soul of the departures … that is, all those ‘82 outtakes. With “Electric Nebraska,” are these E Street Band renditions really the nirvana that fans have hungered to hear for four-plus decades? Yes and no — some of them don’t quite come off, but some are stunning. Although he clearly made the right overall call in not making “Nebraska” a band album after all, if you’re the type of person who can hold opposing thoughts, you may come away thinking that at least a couple of these songs really do feel superior jacked up for the E Street Band, or a few members thereof.

The real keepers are a trio of songs Springsteen recorded with just two E Streeters as a “rockabilly punk” power trio: “Open All Night,” “Born in the U.S.A.” and “Reason to Believe.” This is where the biggest what if comes into play. What if he’d gotten around to recording all the ”Nebraska” material with that particular tight unit on that particular day? Then the resulting album could well have been a very different masterpiece in its own right. He did not keep going, at least in this wing of the multiverse, so we can be glad for the three we’re getting in that style; to my mind, that trio merits thinking about as its own EP.

As for the remaining five tracks on “Electric Nebraska” that feature the full E Street lineup, perhaps only the version of “Born in the U.S.A.” that was released as this collection’s first teaser track is that galvanizing. But there are no outright clinkers in the bunch, either. The two that comes the closest to just not working on this disc are “Johnny 99” and “Downbound Train.” They’re too fleshed out — and to be specific, they both sporting roadhouse-piano parts that make what we know to be woeful tunes sound altogether too jolly. Roy Bittan is an eternal agent of happiness, of course, but a musical smile is not what those songs require; I think this marks the first time in history when I’ve thought whether a recording would sound better stripped of his piano.

But then, you can feel Springsteen wrestling through a lot of these unreleased takes about whether to accentuate the inherent darkness of the songwriting or to filter that through a brilliant disguise. It’s always been fascinating to do a compare-and-contrast on the “Nebraska” and “Born in the U.S.A.” albums in that regard, with the former LP eager to wallow in depression and the latter a little more inclined to wiggle through it. With the eventual release of the songs “Born in the U.S.A.” and “Working on the Highway,” Springsteen ultimately came down on the side of an ebullience that is in no way suggested by the lyrics. That was a great call on his part — we’re all grown-ups, we can handle irony — but in his earlier attempts, it also feelings valuable to hear him escort these songs to the lesser-lit side of town.

Of any of the songs from this period, “Working on the Highway” went through the most fascinating transformations. It appears twice on the “Nebraska Outtakes” disc, sort of. First it arrives as a substantially but not wholly different composition called “Child Bride,” which is, obviously from the title, an extremely “Nebraska”-ian take on a tune that Springsteen had not yet had the audacity to reimagine as a rockabilly rave-up. To play up that the narrator has run afoul of the law for marrying an underage girl, or to bury the lede there and just emphasize the deep fun of forced prison-gang labor? It’s not exactly surprising Springsteen went the way he did, but you’ve got to admire the brute integrity of the song’s beginnings.

“Child Bride,” if you count it as a separate song apart from “Working on the Highway,” is one of four previously unreleased titles that appear in Springsteen’s solo sessions, included here on the “Nebraska Outtakes” disc. Even if none of them was essential, all four would have been worthy additions to “Nebraska” if it’d been released in the first wave of CDs, where longer albums were suddenly de rigueur, instead of toward the tail end of the original vinyl era. “On the Prowl” would’ve added a nice color just for how primal, even feral, it is. “Losin’ Kind” is probably the weakest of the four, as a somewhat narratively overwrought tale of just how wrong a night with a prostitute can go, although it’s hard to turn down any Springsteen song that ends with a wreck on the highway, isn’t it?

Probably the most interesting of the four unheard compositions is “Gun in Every Home,” in which nothing nearly so dramatic happens, but that’s part of why it would’ve offered a slightly different color to the album. Yes, there’s a gun in the first act, but it doesn’t go off in the third; the fact that the threat is violence is placed in an affluent neighborhood gets at how paranoia infiltrates the suburbs, too, and hardly just forsaken small towns.

Kind of the coolest thing about the “Outtakes” disc, though, is how it includes discarded solo recordings that have more early-Elvis energy than those that made the album. Imagine a “Nebraska” with “Pink Cadillac” on it! That sounds wrong, right? But that and a few other alternate versions of familiar tunes sound like something that could have come out of Memphis, suggesting a possible version of the album that could have balanced out the brooding with some greasy fun.

But no one should regret that the final LP was streamlined to be more of a downer. Arguably, the Reagan years demanded it, to fully consider the power outage in that shining city on a hill — or that mansion on the hill — before Springsteen lit everything up again with “Born in the U.S.A.” After his simpler-sounding one-off, we would never feel so simple again.