Hear Me Out: 'Nebraska' is the greatest Bruce Springsteen album by ...

“Bob Dylan is the father of my country,” Bruce Springsteen writes in his memoir. “Highway 61 Revisited and Bringing It All Back Home were not only great records, but they were the first time I can remember being exposed to a truthful vision of the place I lived. The darkness and light were all there, the veil of illusion and deception ripped aside.”

With Nebraska, The Boss even rips aside his usual pomp of instrumentation to lay the true dark side of his nation bare in a stark open surgery of its heartland. Beginning with the bleak wail of a dissonant harmonica, The Boss draws you into a world of despair. With a peculiar sense of despondent equanimity, he may as well mumble the line, “Me and her went for a ride sir / And ten innocent people died.”

Over the course of the next ten tracks and 40 minutes, Springsteen doesn’t let his boot off the neck of America’s casually unspooling brutality. As he whisks up the tale of Charles Starkweather from the elemental background of Americana music, he pulls you into a heartless drama so equanimous it’s hardly dramatic at all.

In this storytelling guise, Springsteen has always been at his best. In tracks like ‘Glory Days’ and ‘Born to Run’, he brings a literary welter of corroborations to stadium rock; you picture the protagonists and their beat-up cars – elements that aren’t literally in the lyrics but reside somewhere in the picture he paints. While these songs have rollicking melodies on their side, they’ve been done before. However, there is a uniqueness to Nebraska that hasn’t been matched.

And the singular story he tells this time is a pertinent one. Like a Cormac McCarthy novel stripped down and rendered in desolate strumming folk, Springsteen etches under the surface of something rarely addressed with such definition by an artist of such esteem: the violent heart of America. This is an intent and vision that he never abates from for a second on a perfectly realised record.

He plucks away distantly, his voice forever at the forefront of the mix with an echo chamber that amplifies the country croon he adopts. Meanwhile, harps of harmonica offer up a despairing wind, and that’s just about all he lays down on this most bare of albums. The intent of this is clear and without subtlety, but that only adds to the bludgeoning impact, offering no respite from a reality we usually skirt around.

Then, boldly, in a move lesser artists wouldn’t have made, he offers a glimmer of hope at the final hurdle with ‘Reason to Believe’. However, more so than a moment of counterbalance, it seems this conclusion ties into the bleakness by encapsulating the modicum that allows the misery to perpetuate itself unchecked. It’s as though he’s saying that as long as there is a glimmer of hope to sustain the dying American Dream, then it’s allowed to go on dying, leaving the previous nine chapters largely unaddressed.

These short stories and their sustained stark melodic backdrops are intricate works written humbly in blood and viscera. Cops looking the other way, gallows humour akin to the true crime quips captured in In Cold Blood, people pinning their hopes on a lottery, and murderers without remorse all make up one of the most exacting albums in American history.

Flowing with the same unspooling serenity as the landscape that billowed on endlessly afore the windscreen of Starkweather as he made his murderous spree across the country, occasionally a Chuck Berry riff will be thrown up on the radio, but aside from that, it’s bleak right the way to the bone, upheaval and violence woven into the monochrome inertia of long horizons so seamlessly and commonplace that their comatose and without power worthy of breaking a croon. Springsteen has never been as truthful with his vision as he is on Nebraska—a horrible, brilliant piece of art.