Cover

The album cover for Nebraska was taken by photographer David Kennedy well before he and Springsteen met for what Marsh calls a “marathon photo session” that produced two other portraits of Springsteen that were used on the other sections of the album (Marsh 375-76). The front cover proposes a change for Springsteen’s work, not only because it is a bleak look at gray sky and land along an empty highway, but because its point of view has shifted from the perspective of a audience appreciating an artist—the usual portrait of Bruce—to an invitation to share the perspective of the artist, and if we take the analogy further, and listen to the words of the title track, we realize with horror that we are looking at the gray skies and bleak landscape through a rain-spattered windshield with Charlie Starkweather’s eyes. This interiorization of the viewer’s point of view mirrors Bruce’s goal in making the album: to explore the loss of the American Dream to American isolation, “what happens to people when they’re alienated from their friends and their community and their government and their job” (qtd. in Marsh 339-40) while, as Marsh notes, “responding to the changing context of his own life” (340). Until Nebraska, audiences had been invited to a show; with this album, the listener was invited to share a road trip to nowhere.