Nebraska & Indiana
The other night we watched the Springsteen biopic, Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere. I wasn’t prepared for it. I thought we’d be watching a biopic of Bruce making my favorite record of his, but what I saw hit way too close to home for me. That’s not to say it isn’t good, it is, and I highly recommend it, but, it made me realize that Indiana is closer to Nebraska than I intended it to be.
You see, it started on a whim. Due to financial constraints, I, in jest, asked my Instagram followers if I should make a Nebraska style album, and I did a mock up of an album inspired by the cover with a black and white photo I took from my car on Indiana 45 in Bean Blossom. People said, “yeah, do it.” So, I took one song I had and got to work writing about a dozen more for the project over the next two weeks or so, with a straggler coming in at the end (much the way “My Father’s House” did).
I purposely didn’t listen to Nebraska until today (songs written, music recorded, just need to cut vocals so it will not influence my record directly). And yeah, obviously Bruce and I are both Flannery O’Connor fans. Her influence is so strong on me that I can find her in almost everything I write. And yeah, it was written in a pretty depressing episode of my life. So, I knew there’d be similarities, but watching the film last night, I realized how much this record is my Nebraska.
“Indiana” is about making peace with where I come from and the people who inhabit that space. Who I am and who they are. As O’Connor once said (and this is in the movie), “Where you come from is gone, and where you thought you were going never existed in the first place.”
“Calendar Page” is about watching my daughter grow up and accepting she is in this transition phase between girl and woman and while her life for me is present and past, with motivation for her future, most of her life is ahead of her.
“High Tops & Architecture” is about Chuck Taylor and my hometown, which is world renown for architecture. He left to make his mark and now, decades after his death, his legacy remains, much like the men who built all those buildings rooted in the ground there.
“Easter Morning” is the story of my childhood.
“A Son of the Church of Christ Without Christ” is a nod to O’Connor’s Wise Blood and a story too common to too many people about absent fathers and, often, the girl left behind to raise a child of her own.
“Goodnight John Boy” tells the story of a murder in my hometown in 1993. Like Starkweather, he was unrepentant.
“Bill Graham’s Bible” is the story of Steve McQueen.
“Be Kind, Please Rewind” is the story of my high school band and three kids on the verge of being men, but not knowing how to be men.
“Castle on the Cumberland” refers to the Kentucky State Prison in Eddyville. Working class rural people’s challenges and how God might forgive, but the state does not.
“Fallen Angels” was meant to lighten the mood, even though it’s a true story and I almost disappeared that night.
“Madge” tells the story of Madge Oberholtzer, perhaps the most important murder victim in Indiana history.
These are all my stories and the stories of Hoosiers, but if comparing these two records tells me anything, it’s that people, we’re all the same. We all have weaknesses, struggles and tragedies. We all should have hope. The stories Bruce wrote in 1981 and 1982 are about people who are no different than the people I’m writing about today. His stories are his and sound like him. Mine are mine and sound like me. But we’re not so different at the end of the day.