Bruce Springsteen’s catalog is varied. He has an album for every mood and life stage. One of Springsteen’s most vital and isolated albums is Nebraska. This work saw him become deeply introspective, while the rest of his albums are more outward-looking. Springsteen uncovered many things about himself through this project, but one of the significant things he worked through was his complicated relationship with his father. Learn more below.
Springsteen’s Ode to His Complicated Father
Bruce Springsteen is an artist. With that vocation comes a specific personality and temperament, one that not everyone readily accepts. It took him a while to come into his own, but he eventually began to come to terms with his “sense of self.”
“When I was a child, and into my teens…I felt like a very, very empty vessel,” Springsteen once said. “And it wasn’t until I began to fill it up with music that I began to feel my own personal power and my impact on my friends and the small world that I was in. I began to get some sense of myself. But it came out of a place of real emptiness.”
One thing that kept Springsteen from that sense of belonging was his relationship with his father. He hasn’t been shy about discussing their issues. He once called trying to gain his favor a “lifelong quest.”
“My mother was kind and compassionate and very considerate of others feelings,” he added. “She trod through the world with purpose, but softly, lightly. All those were the things that aligned with my own spirit. That was who I was. They came naturally to me. My father looked at all those things as weaknesses. He was very dismissive of primarily who I was. And that sends you off on a lifelong quest to sort through that.”
Springsteen’s Nebraksa
Like many young boys, Bruce Springsteen admired his father for many things, but he also disagreed with some aspects of his life. He couldn’t escape the ways they were set apart from one another, so he decided to write an album about it.
Nebraska is unlike any other Springsteen album. It’s raw and poignant. There are real emotions behind this work, and they are impossible to ignore. When you consider how Springsteen was feeling about his father at the time, it makes Nebraska all the more powerful.
“My father was my hero, and my greatest foe,” Springsteen once said. That spectrum is more than captured in this stellar album.
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