Bruce Springsteen on ‘Electric Nebraska’: ‘It was a bit of a shock’

Bruce Springsteen is set to release the Nebraska ’82: Expanded Edition box set, which includes the long-rumored Electric Nebraska. While the recording is something fans have speculated about for years, up until recently Springsteen didn’t know it existed.

“I was taken aback when I found out Electric Nebraska was something real, that we’d gone as far as we had,” he says in a new interview in Mojo. “But we went back and found the tapes, and it was a bit of a shock. It was a surprise to me. And I think it’ll be a surprise to fans.”

Springsteen says fans shouldn’t expect the songs to be full E Street Band takes on the acoustic Nebraska songs.

“For most of the electric versions, we cut the band down to three pieces. And they were just howling. It’s this very primitive sort of rock ’n’ roll,” Springsteen says. “When I went back and listened to it, I was shocked to find that that’s the way that I approached it at that particular moment.”

And while Springsteen chose to release acoustic songs that he recorded on cassette tape, he says it wasn’t necessarily because the electric ones were bad.

“There’s no way to fully and completely understand why one recording seems to be speaking in the right tongue and another isn’t,” he says. “Were they better than the electric versions? That wasn’t even the question. The bedroom recordings did something for me that no other version of the songs seemed to be doing. That was the only measure I could go by.”

Nebraska ‘82: Expanded Edition will be released Oct. 24 in four-LP plus Blu-ray and four-CD plus Blu-ray configurations.

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