A Character Study in Cold-Bloodedness: The Meaning Behind “Nebraska” by Bruce Springsteen

Bruce Springsteen‘s “Nebraska” begins with a fictionalized bit of court testimony, delivered by mass murderer Charles Starkweather to the judge who’s about to sentence him to death.

“I saw her standin’ on her front lawn, just a’twirlin’ her baton,” Springsteen sings, coloring his voice with a folksy accent that’s far more evocative of the American heartland than his native New Jersey. “Me and her went for a ride, sir, and 10 innocent people died.” 

Those startling lines are the first words we hear on Nebraska, and they set the tone for the starkest, sparsest album of Springsteen’s career. He infamously recorded the entire album in a single day, playing all the instruments himself, tracking the performances with a homemade studio rig—a Japanese Tascam 144 cassette recorder, an Echoplex tape delay unit, a Panasonic boombox, and a cheap cassette tape—whose components cost him a total of $1,000.

This was home-recording at its most primitive, a world away from the full-band bombast of Born in the U.S.A., which he began recording several weeks later. Without the power of an amplified band, Springsteen had to look elsewhere to make his mark. What he found was a lo-fi acoustic sound that channeled Woody Guthrie and a batch of folk songs whose characters had reached the end of their ropes—and sometimes their lives. 

Springsteen had already built his reputation as a chronicler of the desperate, the down-and-out, the downtrodden. What he hadn’t done yet was write songs about cold-blooded murderers. Nebraska is filled with killers, from the drunk auto worker who shoots a night clerk in “Johnny 99” to the Vietnam vet who beats a man to death in “Highway Patrolman.” While both of those songs manage to stir up some sympathy for their anti-heroes, “Nebraska” shines its light on Starkweather, the troubled and utterly unsympathetic teenager who roped his 14-year-old girlfriend into a killing spree in January 1958. Springsteen doesn’t show compassion for Starkweather, and he doesn’t condemn him, either. Instead, he delivers the story from Starkweather’s emotionless perspective and lets the audience draw its own conclusion.   

“I wanted black bedtime stories,” he wrote in his 2016 autobiography, Born to Run, remembering the creative period that spawned Nebraska. “I thought of the records of John Lee Hooker and Robert Johnson, music that sounded so good with the lights out. I wanted the listener to hear my characters think, to feel their thoughts, their choices.”

We certainly feel those thoughts in “Nebraska.” Starkweather never did show regret for his actions, even as he sat in the electric chair on the morning of June 25, 1959, and courtroom transcripts show he remained indifferent during his trial, too. When asked by his own chief counsel, T. Clement Gaughan, if he felt remorse for the people he murdered, he replied with a simple, “I won’t answer that.”

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Springsteen’s song summons up that stubborn nonchalance in the third verse, where the character states, I can’t say that I’m sorry for the things that we done / At least for a little while, sir, me and her, we had us some fun. Those lines are borrowed from the letter Starkweather wrote to his father while awaiting execution in Wyoming, stating, “But dad I’m not real sorry for what I did cause for the first time me and caril had more fun.” Springsteen delivers those words plainly, maintaining a steady volume and a flat tone, channeling the same lack of emotion that Starkweather displayed not only at the scene of his various crimes, but in the courthouse, as well. 

Starkweather never did give a motive for his actions, although his hardscrabble background—including a bowlegged birth defect, a childhood stutter, an unemployed father, and an inner rage that only seemed to increase with age—likely led to his bitter disposition. That’s no reason to kill people, of course, which only makes his actions more chilling. The final lines of “Nebraska” channel that coldness, with Springsteen’s character almost audibly shrugging his shoulders as he says, They want to know why I did what I did / Well, sir, I guess there’s just a meanness in this world.

“Nebraska” offers no answers, no commiseration, no peek into the mind of a troubled soul. But that’s the song’s selling point: it stirs emotion without offering any of its own. “The writing was in the details; the twisting of a ring, the twirling of a baton, was where these songs found their character,” Springsteen adds in Born to Run. As a first-person narrative of senseless violence, “Nebraska” challenges its listeners to read between the lines, complete the character study themselves, and ultimately hand down their own verdict. “Nebraska” doesn’t meet anybody halfway, after all—it pulls them in, transporting the audience to an immersive world where characters, rather than cathartic performances, are the star attraction. 

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