Bruce Springsteen on the poetry of his classic album "Nebraska"
CBSN
"I lived in this house exactly half a lifetime ago," said Bruce Springsteen. It may not look like much, but this small bedroom in Colts Neck, New Jersey, which still sports the original orange shag rug, is where Springsteen made what he considers his masterpiece: his 1982 album "Nebraska," ten songs dark and mournful. "This is the room where it happened," he said.
I saw her standing on her front lawn just twirling her baton Me and her went for a ride, sir, and ten innocent people died From the town of Lincoln, Nebraska, with a sawed-off .410 on my lap Through to the badlands of Wyoming I killed everything in my path
"If I had to pick one album out and say, 'This is going to represent you 50 years from now,' I'd pick 'Nebraska," he said.
The story of America can be told through the lyrics of folk music – songs of the Great Depression, the civil rights era, and the social revolutions of the 1960s. As folk singer Pete Seeger put it in 1967, "A song isn't a speech; a song is not an editorial. If a song tries to be an editorial or a speech, often it fails as a song. The best songs tell a story, paint a picture, and leave the conclusion up actually to the listener."