The Dysphoria Within You Never Goes Away

How is the holy grail supposed to feel?

For me, it was hovering over a play button on my phone wondering if it was worth it to listen to a song I never thought would be released in my lifetime, while I stood shivering in a cold New Jersey fall morning trying to wrangle two rambunctious dogs inside.

"There's no way this is actually real," I thought to myself, as the first chords of an unreleased version of Bruce Springsteen's "Nebraska" rang out. The initial harmonica chords not differentiating much from the studio release 43 years ago, but quickly you can hear the arpeggios of an electric guitar play behind, an instrument not found on the seminal album.

This version was all too real and out there in the physical reality for anyone to listen to should they choose to press play.

Electric Nebraska is here.

Nevermind the fact that its release was timed to coincide with a big Hollywood biopic about the singer with an a-list cast, or the fact that it is the eighth "lost" Springsteen album released this year (the other seven came from a sprawling box set).

Actually, I take that back. Keep that at the front of your mind when digesting this. Because like the context of the original version from 1982, the context of Electric Nebraska's shocking, and well-intentioned release matters. Like most of Springsteen's discography the context tells the story, adding important layers to the rich tapestry of stories the records tell. The context has always mattered, and it needs to be celebrated.

Electric Nebraska was never supposed to see the light of day.

During the recording of his follow up to the sprawling double-album The River, Springsteen was stuck. The story is well known, enough to be part of the artist's lore, a major book and now finally a big budget movie. The songs weren't coming. He ditched his band. He recorded alone. It was raw. It was personal. It was nothing like he had ever put pen to paper on.

And then he tried to make it work with his usual sound.

It wouldn't. Nothing worked. The album felt off. So, in a bold move, Springsteen shelved the electric versions of the songs he was working on, went back to the original 4-track recorded demos and released it as Nebraska one of the biggest left-turns in rock music history. The bombastic Springsteen had released an acoustic album without the famous backing band that would anchor his three-hour long marathon shows. That anchored the wall of sound he stole from Phil Spector and made his own (without the baggage Spector carried). That made a Springsteen record an event.

For years rumors persisted that this version of Nebraska existed in the vast vault that Springsteen would open up. To be a fan of New Jersey's finest, meant to bear witness to him and share that. There are not two words in music that go together like Springsteen and "bootleg," in my opinion. Since the 70s he would simulcast many of his shows on the radio bringing his music well beyond the arena. As a result, recordings of much of his live shows throughout his entire career exist in many formats. You can buy most of them these days from Springsteen's website, since his vault has been cracked semi-open permanently. But before the era of mass consumption of media through digital means, it meant passing out cd's to be copied and revered or some of the earlier music filesharing networks online.

Springsteen's most rabid fans want one thing in life: more Springsteen. I like to joke that the first album I ever listened to was "Born to Run" because my mother played it on her record player before I was born and during the first year in my life. I've been to multiple shows with her, and our shared love of Bruce has always been something I've treasured. Being a Bruce fan was a family heirloom, just like being a Knicks fan. Thankfully, the former has enriched my life, while the latter continues to be a tire iron to the shin whenever things start getting good.

To be a fan of Bruce is to engage with this space where fans share memories encoded into live performances, and snippets of tracks that find their way out into the world. Be it through live performances, or slips in the vault, there is always a grail to chase. The ultimate chase, the holy grail of Springsteen bootlegs will you, was always this version of Nebraska. The one that included the E-Street Band. The one that was the true bridge between The River and Born in the U.S.A. The missing link.

What happens when a dog finally chases its tail? Well, for one it usually bites it, and scratches whatever itch is plaguing them. The end is anti-climactic. I like to think its the thrill of the chase, reaching something that draws the mind to twist itself in circles chasing something that is just out of reach. We draw our own conclusions to what that something is when we watch it happen. We imprint on the moment. We understand that feeling.

Everyone has parts of them they want to bear, but for some reason cannot show to the world. Its human nature to struggle to put into words or visuals something that is dear to us. That's why we appreciate great art and recognize it. Its why we create little lies for ourselves to avoid confronting hard truths. Every person grapples with this fundamentality whether they realize they are doing it, or not.

If you know me, I'm sure you understand that most of this essay is building up to something related to my transness. You would be correct.

Listening to Electric Nebraska is dysphoria inducing in a way I did not expect, but absolutely should have.

Each track just feels off. It makes perfect sense why Springsteen shelved this album and went back to the original. Its nowhere near as good. It feels like its trying to use a sledgehammer to jam a square peg into a round hole. It feels like I did when I was so sure that I was controlling my body in a way that I expected to bring happiness to myself. The parts on the outside give the veneer of a true masterpiece of a record. The lyrics really shine on Electric Nebraska, with the rockabilly elements showing an artist near his peak. But it doesn't feel whole.

No track exemplifies this like Atlantic City. The words feel clearer on the electric version, more resonant really. But, the slowed down cadence and the instrumentation takes away from the raw feeling of the studio release. I did not feel like the chicken man was blown up in Philly last night. I did not feel like the narrator was really running away from his debts, rather he was just telling us a story of the time he had to get away from the mob for a little bit. It felt like how I felt every day trying to be a man. Does everything that die someday come back? On that version I couldn't reasonably say yes.

But that's the point, and that's fantastic.

This was never supposed to be an album that supplanted Nebraska. If it was it would have been released in the 1980s. It would have been a hit. Releasing it now, is about showing a crucial piece in the journey to what led to the actual release of Nebraska. There's a reason its happening over 40 years later, and not in 1995. Time has passed long enough, and enough appreciation for what we had all along has led to a look back with context. There's even a movie depicting the struggle to make Nebraska coming out the same day. This isn't a release aimed solely at remembering a past album, its done with the intentionality of taking a look back at multiple angles. The context is the point.

I can't help but contrast this release, frankly a real holiday for Springsteen fans, to the release of Taylor Swift's last album The Life of a Showgirl earlier this month.

Swift is one of the few stars with a vault that resembles Springsteen's, and is putting on shows that rival his 1978 Darkness era tour. My friend Emily St. James even compared them in a seminal essay.

Still, I can't help but compare the way the two have released their back catalogue. Springsteen has released box sets of unreleased tracks, dumping them out for fans to pour over and obsessed about. Like I said, he released seven shelved albums this year alone. There wasn't a major press tour about each, nor were there any more special editions. Just a recognition that they were tracks worth hearing even if they weren't made to be proper albums with a release cycle.

Meanwhile, Swift has fought a tireless campaign to regain her masters by both re-recording her back catalogue along with re-records of shelved tracks and using the profits from her career-spanning Eras Tour to purchase back her old masters at an inflated price. Yet, the longer this has gone on the more it seems there is another side beyond just artistic integrity to this enterprise: its making her a shit ton of money.

Nothing exemplifies this like her latest album. Clocking in at under 50 minutes its one of Swift's shortest releases in her career, but that does not mean there aren't opportunities to create manufactured exclusivity for the release driving up sales. Like, Kelsey McKinney wrote in Defector, "No Good Art Comes from Greed."

I desperately wanted to like The Life of a Showgirl because I desperately want to like Taylor Swift the way I have for most of her career. The songwriting is vivid and tells tales that are relatable by everyone. Much like Springsteen there's something to take away from every album. But, these days the Swift that is a musical icon seems to be becoming more of a Swift that is a cultural icon. I find less in her music than I did much earlier in my life, while it seems every 3-5 years I find something new in Springsteen's catalogue that even an obsessive like me did not notice. If you ask me my favorite album I'll tell you its The River, something age 10, 15, 20, 25 and 30 me would disagree with. And that's beautiful.

Meanwhile my love for Swift seems to be drifting. I've maintained for a while she needs to take a four year hiatus so people can imagine themselves imprinting themselves back on her, without her speaking out to share how we are wrong. Let the art take some time to breathe, before coming back and having us more excited than ever. My friend Emily seems to agree in her last newsletter:

Somewhere in the past couple of years, Swift ceased to be a figure one could turn into an avatar for their own thoughts and feelings. She became a billionaire, she fell in love with someone in a ridiculously public fashion, and she got involved in a weirdly large number of petty feuds. As it turns out, Swift's parasocial appeal to her fans almost always stemmed, on some level, from a certain degree of mystery, a gap between her lyrics and herself. And now that she's just writing directly about a life story that is playing out on our TVs constantly, that element is gone. It's not that she's changed, or that I've changed. It's that I better understand the gap between her and me.

Springsteen has always inserted himself in cultural moments. He's never shied away from endorsing candidates he believed in, and saying that we need a country that works to uplift the most vulnerable. Its why the NYPD boycotted his shows in 2000 after he began performing "American Skin (41 Shots)" a live track aimed at highlighting their brutality. It would take over a decade before that song got a formal studio release, but he never stopped playing it live. If it was a new track that came out today he'd be called "woke" by the media.

That's probably why I keep revisiting the Electric Nebraska version of "Born in the U.S.A." The song has been used cynically by nationalists since its release in the mid 1980s, but this raw version evokes the origins of the song in the midst of the early 1980s economic turmoil. Reagan had not become a symbol of American greatness, and the Cold War still raged on. The piercing of those early guitar chords cut right into your soul, reminding you that if you were born here, a lot of the people in power were giving you jack shit. Ultimately the song would be the lynchpin for Springsteen's next album, but hearing him scream the lyrics over only an electric guitar and drum makes you appreciate the raw intensity it was born from. Its unfinished, and certainly unpolished, but its appreciated.

Immediately following it is an electric version of what has become one of my favorite Nebraska tracks, "Reason to Believe." The original is a haunting end to a record that feels like a specter that will never quite leave your psyche. But the electric version's guitar is punchier and complements the harmonica in a way some of the earlier tracks don't reach. The song tells stories of multiple characters at some of the lowest points in their lives. Still, Bruce is there to remind us something that we can all take away at this moment, or really any moment in our lives: At the end of every hard-earned day / People find some reason to believe.

Things may not feel okay. They may feel wrong. Something will always be off. But you are not alone. You are never alone.