One of the great lost albums in rock history is to finally see the light of day, as Bruce Springsteen announces the release of the electric version of his 1982 album Nebraska.
The original was famously recorded in the bedroom of his New Jersey home, unaccompanied, on a four-track tape recorder rather than a multitrack studio setup. Springsteen attempted to work the songs up into more fleshed-out versions but felt the studio versions lacked the ghostly drama of the originals, and – to some confusion in his fanbase and record label – insisted on releasing the stark four-track takes.
Despite the move away from the full-bodied sound of hit albums Born to Run and The River, Nebraska reached No 3 in the US and UK and is seen as one of the most distinctive and influential albums in Springsteen’s catalogue.
As recently as June, Springsteen was denying that the electric versions existed: “I have no recollection of it, but I can tell you there’s nothing in our vault that would amount to an electric Nebraska,” he told Rolling Stone. But he later updated the journalist, saying: “I checked our vault and there is an electric Nebraska record, though it does not have the full album of songs.”
Those electric versions have now been pulled from the archives and will be included on a five-disc expanded edition of Nebraska, to be released on 17 October in CD and vinyl formats. The “electric Nebraska” disc contains versions of Nebraska’s title track plus its songs Atlantic City, Mansion on the Hill, Johnny 99, Open All Night and Reason to Believe.
It also features Downbound Train and Born in the USA, which both appeared in different versions on the Born in the USA album in 1984, for which Springsteen re-embraced studio recording and created the biggest hit album of his career.
The electric Nebraska version of Born in the USA has been released alongside the album announcement. It’s a radically different take to the later version that hit the US and UK Top 10, with a more brooding vocal melody and outlaw-country backing.
Also in the expanded album edition is a 2025 remaster of the original album; a disc of Nebraska outtakes, featuring unreleased songs such as Gun in Every Home, Child Bride and On the Prowl; and a disc plus a Blu-ray of a live concert from Count Basie theatre in Red Bank, New Jersey.
The release is timed to coincide with a biopic that documents this chapter in Springsteen’s life.
Entitled Deliver Me from Nowhere and written and directed by Scott Cooper, it stars Jeremy Allen White as Springsteen alongside Jeremy Strong as manager Jon Landau, Odessa Young as semi-fictional love interest Faye Romano, Stephen Graham as Springsteen’s father and Paul Walter Hauser as Mike Batlan, who oversaw the Nebraska recording sessions at Springsteen’s home.
The film, released 24 October, explores Springsteen’s burgeoning fame after the successful single Hungry Heart and his quest to write, record and release Nebraska in a way that honours the original sessions.
Springsteen has been digging further into his archive lately. In June, he released Tracks II: The Lost Albums, a box set of seven full-length unreleased albums of material he made between other album projects. It was the sequel to his 1998 box set Tracks.
He said a Tracks III box set, made up of individual tracks rather than full lost albums, is also incoming. “Still a lot of music in the vault, and that’s something that I’ve finished and is ready to be released,” he told Rolling Stone in June. “It’s just a question of when we have time to put that out, considering that I have a variety of other things that I’m interested in releasing soon also … I suppose it’ll come out in the next three years or so.”
