In January 1982, Bruce Springsteen sat alone in his bedroom in Colts Neck, New Jersey, and recorded a collection of songs onto a four-track cassette recorder that would become Nebraska — an album so stark and unexpected that it baffled his record label, confused his audience, and ultimately reshaped his artistic identity. Warren Zanes, a musician and music historian, reconstructs the story of how the biggest rock star in America followed up the commercial breakthrough of The River with an album of ghostly folk songs about murderers, highway patrolmen, and people ground down by economic despair. Zanes draws on extensive interviews with Springsteen, producer Jon Landau, manager Mike Appel, and the musicians of the E Street Band to reveal the personal and creative crisis that produced the record. Springsteen was reading Flannery O'Connor and watching Terrence Malick's Badlands, struggling with depression, and questioning whether the anthemic rock and roll that had made him famous could say what he needed to say. The demos he recorded were originally intended as sketches for a full band album, but every attempt to re-record them in a professional studio failed — the songs lost their power when given conventional production. The decision to release the raw cassette recordings as the finished album was nearly unprecedented for a major artist. Zanes shows how Nebraska became a turning point not just for Springsteen but for the possibilities of what a mainstream rock musician could do, opening a path toward the intimate solo work that would define his later career.