Perhaps I read too far into things, but this album delves into human emotions like nothing I've ever heard. The songs aren't particularly musically inspiring. In fact, they're all really depressing. But there's also a kind of desperate hope offered in Springsteen's lyrics. The songs express the most awful and amazing aspects of the human experience simultaneously.
In the title track, inspired by the 1973 film Badlands, a man tries to hold on to his humanity and his dignity, even after committing a string of atrocities. Songs like “Atlantic City” and “State Trooper” reveal people at the end of their ropes, but refusing to give up hope, however miniscule their chance of deliverance. And songs like “Highway Patrolman” and “Mansion on the Hill” portray conflicting emotions, nostalgia, and making a real choice about living.
The album's effects on me are twofold. First, it drove home the idea that I should never give up hope. These characters, although fictional, somehow seem more real than most flesh and blood people, despite being at the absolute bottom of the social order. Yet they refuse to let external circumstances destroy them. Secondly, it set something of a new goal for my creative activities. I realized that if one man can create something so absolutely haunting and beautiful on a four track tape recorder, there is no reason I can't create something just as amazing with my talents, even if they don't lie in the same area.
Sometimes a person needs to find a work of art that makes clear what they've known all along, and inspire them to do what they've always wanted to do. “Nebraska” is art in every sense: musical, literary, and even aesthetic, if you have an active enough imagination. In short, it's amazing. And because of that, it's made my life immeasurably better.