Bruce Springsteen to release ‘Electric Nebraska’ box set this fall
The Boss’ latest from-the-vaults release arrives a week before the new ‘Deliver Me From Nowhere’ biopic opens
You thought you already had all the Bruce Springsteen unreleased album box sets you needed? Think again.
Earlier this year, Springsteen released Tracks II: The Lost Albums, a box set that includes seven previously unreleased albums in their entirety, recorded between 1983 and 2018.
Now, the Boss has pulled one more box of previously unissued material out of his vault.
On Oct. 17, he’ll release Nebraska ’82: Expanded Edition, which will include the Electric Nebraska sessions in which the solitary, stripped down songs on his album Nebraska were recorded with a plugged-in band, with an approach that Springsteen calls “punk rockabilly.”
“We were trying to bring Nebraska into the electric world," he said in a press release.
The box will also include a “Nebraska Outtakes” disc with nine songs, including alternative versions of the Born in the U.S.A. title track and three other songs from that 1984 album, plus more obscure rarities such as “On the Prowl” and “Gun In Every Home,” which were recorded in separate sessions in 1982.
The five-disc set available on LP and CD will also include a remastered version of the original Nebraska album, which Springsteen composed while under the influence of Flannery O’Connor and killer Charlie Starkweather. Springsteen famously recorded it on a four-track tape machine in his Colts Neck, N.J., bedroom on a cassette in his jacket pocket before the decision was made to issue the album as is.
» READ MORE: Bruce Springsteen’s ‘Lost Albums’ have arrived and here’s our review. Yes, of all seven of them.
The box also includes a newly recorded live album and Blu-ray of Springsteen performing the 10 Nebraska songs in sequence at the Count Basie Theatre in Red Bank, N.J., which he had never done in the 43 years since the album was released.
Not coincidentally, the Nebraska box will come out one week before the wide release of Deliver Me From Nowhere, Scott Cooper’s unorthodox Springsteen biopic starring Jeremy Allen White that chronicles the making of Nebraska and is based on Warren Zanes’ book of the same title. The movie, which also stars Jeremy Strong as Springsteen’s longtime manager Jon Landau, premiered at the Telluride Film Festival on Labor Day weekend.
Listen to the Nebraska ‘82 alternative version of “Born in the U.S.A.” below.