Bruce Springsteen has announced a Nebraska expansion that includes the fabled Electric Nebraska sessions, released for the first time. Long sought-after by fans, Electric Nebraska is the informal title of the album that Springsteen and the E Street Band recorded, in 1982, from a suite of demos for his follow-up to The River. But the Boss, preferring his originals, scrapped the full-band versions and instead released a selection of his stripped-down demos as Nebraska. Not all of them, though: Some were held back for his next album, Born in the U.S.A. One was the title track, and below, you can hear the Electric Nebraska version that might have been.
Nebraska ’82: Expanded Edition arrives October 17 as a 4xLP or 4xCD box set, which both come with a Blu-ray containing a Thom Zimny–directed video of the band performing Nebraska in full this year. (The audio is one of the four audio discs, too.) The other discs comprise a remaster of the original album and a collection of Nebraska home recordings, some unreleased, plus tracks from a 1982 solo studio session.
On the version of “Born in the U.S.A.” below, Max Weinberg and Garry Tallent back Springsteen. “We threw out the keyboards and played basically as a three-piece,” Springsteen said in a press release. “It was kinda like punk rockabilly. We were trying to bring Nebraska into the electric world.”
He added of the live Nebraska rendition, “I think in playing these songs again to be filmed, their weight impressed upon me. I’ve written a lot of other narrative records, but there’s just something about that batch of songs on Nebraska that holds some sort of magic.”
Springsteen recently reissued a series of mythic shelved records in the box set Tracks II: The Lost Albums. His new biopic, Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere, starring Jeremy Allen White as Springsteen, got its first trailer in June. The movie, centering on the creation of Nebraska, arrives in theaters on October 25.
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Nebraska ’82: Expanded Edition:
01 Born in the U.S.A. (Demo Version – 1982)
02 Losin’ Kind (Nebraska Outtakes)
03 Downbound Train (Nebraska Outtakes)
04 Child Bride (Nebraska Outtakes)
05 Pink Cadillac (Nebraska Outtakes)
06 The Big Payback (Single B-side – 1982)
07 Working on the Highway (Nebraska Outtakes)
08 On the Prowl (Nebraska Outtakes)
09 Gun in Every Home (Nebraska Outtakes)
