Lyrics: “Nashville Tennessee” – Frank Turner, 2008
I don’t recall, when I first became aware of Bruce Springsteen as an iconic rock artist. I’ve never been a fan and I admit I still mostly / basically only know his hits from the time we went out dancing at 17 / 18 years old. The rock club we went to did not just play the then current hits, but also older songs like “Born in the U.S.A”, “Hungry Heart” or “Because the Night”. From that time on 30 odd years ago I knew who he was and of course he stayed around in the periphery of my music world.
Neither do I exactly recall, when I worked out the neat reference in these Frank Turner lyrics. Sometime in the summer of 2013 most probably, when I was listening to all the music Frank had released up to that point.
[Featured photo of this post has nothing to do with the movie or Bruce or Nebraska (I did try) but was a flash of colour this morning on my way to breakfast on a otherwise drab and grey day over here.]
After a exhausting week at work I felt a “mini break” was in order. So this morning I took myself off to have breakfast elsewhere and a matinee showing of “Deliver Me From Nowhere” the new biopic about… Bruce Springsteen and how and why he wrote the album “Nebraska” in 1982. I didn’t know anything more about the movie, but had heard good things from a friend who had seen it this week.
I kind of liked it. It touched on topics I could relate to: mental health issues, difficult relationship with a parent and the regrets you might feel, when things were left unsaid. I also enjoyed the insight into the music industry in the early 1980s and how they actually did record and promote albums then and why it was such a big deal that “Nebraska” was so different. I had no idea about all of that re: that album So all in all worth watching, if that’s something you might be interested it. I found some of the dialogue especially from his manager Jon too stilted as they had too much of an “I am now going to explain what’s going on in Bruce’s mind” vibe. It felt weird to me: either let the man himself explain it or let the songs speak for themselves.
As a hardcore fangirl of another artist I was also wondering how the hardcore fans of Bruce feel about seeing a fictional version of the man in what turned out to be formative time 40 years ago. And why an living artist (same goes for Bob Dylan this year) agrees to this project. It must be a bit weird to see yourself played by someone else on a movie screen, right?
