Bruce Springsteen Dealt With His 1st ‘Real Major Depression’ Making 1 Classic Album
In 1982, Bruce Springsteen released the album Nebraska. Though he intended to record the album with the E Street Band, he ultimately did not require their backing. Instead, he released the sparse, bleak songs as he had initially recorded them in his home. Nebraska would go on to be one of Springsteen’s most highly acclaimed albums, but he said the process of making it was very lonely.
Bruce Springsteen said the process of making 1 album was lonely
By 1982, Springsteen was a bonafide rock star. Despite his success, though, he began to feel a yawning despondency within himself.
“I just hit some sort of personal wall that I didn’t even know was there,” he told CBS News. “It was my first real major depression where I realized, ‘Oh, I’ve got to do something about it.'”
Though he had experienced great career success, he wanted more for his personal life, especially as he began to grow older.
“I think in your 20s, a lotta things work for you,” he said. “Your 30s is where you start to become an adult. Suddenly I looked around and said, ‘Where is everything? Where is my home? Where is my partner? Where are the sons or daughters that I thought I might have someday?’ And I realized none of those things are there.”
In this headspace, he returned home and began to write. He took inspiration from a news story about a spree killer and his own childhood. The resulting album was a critical success, but Springsteen recalled it as a lonely project.
“I was 32 at the time. I had just finished Nebraska, literally,” he told Rolling Stone. “I don’t think it was out yet. And that was a pretty lonely record. It may have struck home. But my own biological clock may have been ticking toward that point. You carry your baggage, and if you don’t start unpacking, your bags get heavier as you move along. So at some point, the weight becomes impossible to carry and you look for some way to unpack those bags. And it can get pretty messy. That’s what happened to me.”
He once shared how writing dark material helps him see the light in things
Though he described Nebraska as a particularly lonely album, Springsteen said the “depressive side” of himself comes through on many of his records.
“[It’s in] every other record, probably [laughs],” he said. “And obviously, you look at The Ghost of Tom Joad and Nebraska and there’s plenty of it in Tunnel of Love. I address it on Tunnel of Love, in the song ‘Two Faces.’ It’s something I addressed as I’ve gone along by seesawing between what might be considered band records and what might be considered solo records. If you go to Darkness on the Edge of Town, there’s plenty of it there.”
He explained that the melancholy in some of his songs only lends credence to the exuberance in others.
“So if the triumphant part of the song was going to feel real and not just hacked out, I had to have something I was pushing up against,” he said. “I just understood that balance. It comes out of gospel music, which is the music of transcendence. I wanted my music to be a music of transcendence.”
A film about Bruce Springsteen and the making of his album ‘Nebraska’ is in the works
In 2024, 20th Century Studios finalized a deal to produce and release a film about the making of Nebraska. Scott Cooper will write and direct the film, Deliver Me From Nowhere.
“It’s a once-in-a-lifetime honor to be collaborating with Bruce Springsteen, an inspiring and incomparable artist who represents so much to so many,” Disney Live Action and 20th Century Studios president David Greenbaum said, per Esquire. “The deep authenticity of his story is in great hands with my friend Scott Cooper, whom I am thrilled to be collaborating with once again.”
While the film is still in early stages, Jeremy Allen White is confirmed to play Springsteen.
