Bruce Springsteen\u2019s catalog is varied. He has an album for every mood and life stage. One of Springsteen\u2019s most vital and isolated albums is Nebraska. This work saw him become deeply introspective, while the rest of his albums are more outward-looking. Springsteen uncovered many things about himself through this project, but one of the significant things he worked through was his complicated relationship with his father. Learn more below.<\/p>\n
[RELATED: Remember When Bruce Springsteen Scored His Only No. 1 in 1977\u2026 With Someone Else Recording the Song?]<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n Springsteen\u2019s Ode to His Complicated Father<\/p>\n Bruce Springsteen is an artist. With that vocation comes a specific personality and temperament, one that not everyone readily accepts. It took him a while to come into his own, but he eventually began to come to terms with his \u201csense of self.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cWhen I was a child, and into my teens\u2026I felt like a very, very empty vessel,\u201d Springsteen once said<\/a>. \u201cAnd it wasn\u2019t until I began to fill it up with music that I began to feel my own personal power and my impact on my friends and the small world that I was in. I began to get some sense of myself. But it came out of a place of real emptiness.\u201d<\/p>\n One thing that kept Springsteen from that sense of belonging was his relationship with his father. He hasn\u2019t been shy about discussing their issues. He once called trying to gain his favor a \u201clifelong quest.\u201d <\/p>\n \u201cMy mother was kind and compassionate and very considerate of others feelings,\u201d he added. \u201cShe trod through the world with purpose, but softly, lightly. All those were the things that aligned with my own spirit.\u00a0That\u00a0was who I was. They came naturally to me. My father looked at all those things as weaknesses. He was very dismissive of primarily who I was. And that sends you off on a lifelong quest to sort through that.\u201d<\/p>\n Springsteen\u2019s Nebraksa<\/strong><\/p>\n Like many young boys, Bruce Springsteen admired his father for many things, but he also disagreed with some aspects of his life. He couldn\u2019t escape the ways they were set apart from one another, so he decided to write an album about it.<\/p>\n Nebraska is unlike any other Springsteen album. It\u2019s raw and poignant. There are real emotions behind this work, and they are impossible to ignore. When you consider how Springsteen was feeling about his father at the time, it makes Nebraska all the more powerful. <\/p>\n \u201cMy father was my hero, and my greatest foe,\u201d Springsteen once said<\/a>. That spectrum is more than captured in this stellar album. <\/p>\n