Forty years ago, BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN released Nebraska, a lo-fi fever dream populated by troubled cops and serial killers, the lost and the lonely. The songs were a new kind of writing, with a depth that rendered his credibility “forever bulletproof”. But at the time, even Springsteen asked himself if, by releasing it, he was throwing everything away. “I got to wondering, What the hell am I doing?”

Words by DAVID FRICKE.

THE CASSETTE FIT INTO THE FRONT POCKET of Bruce Springsteen’s denim jacket, which is where he kept it for months – without a case – in early 1982: more than a dozen new songs in stark, solo demos, some in multiple versions and mixes, recorded that winter on a portable 4-track machine in his New Jersey home. But the tape weighed a ton in the singer’s head – part talisman, part conscience – as he started working with the E Street Band on a new album, the intended follow-up to Springsteen’s two-disc epic, 1980’s The River.

For three weeks in late April and May at the Power Station in New York City, the music came like a freight train.

Hot and tight after 138 shows in 1980 and ’81, then Februar y ’82 sessions for an album by R&B legend Gar y U.S.

Bonds, Springsteen and the E Street Band caught early, master takes – straight from the floor – of songs from the cassette, including the foreboding grind of Downbound Train and Child Bride, a set of lyrics rewired into the hardluck rockabilly jolt Working On The Highway.

“We had a particular way of working – which was ever ything was live,” recalled Chuck Plotkin, a mixing engineer on 1978’s Darkness On The Edge Of Town and The River who was back at the console, co-producing this time with Springsteen, his manager Jon Landau and E Street guitarist Steven Van Zandt. “It was a rock band, and the guys could play,” Plotkin went on. “There was a certain vitality that you got from not doing 2,700 takes of things” – arefreshing change from the leader’s notorious perfectionism in the studio.

One song came to unexpected life at the Power Station when Springsteen called for a pass at an idea that had evolved over several demos, in different tempos and vocal approaches, from a blues simply called Vietnam into a scathing indictment of patriotic hypocrisy. Springsteen called it Born In The USA.

“To me, it was a dead song,” Landau later confessed to Springsteen biographer Dave Marsh, “one of the lesser songs” on the cassette – until the singer came up with the titanic entrance: a synthesizer riff played by pianist Roy Bittan and detonated like an arena-rock bomb by drummer Max Weinberg. Ever ything else came together in the second take.