Badlands 
A Tribute To Bruce Springsteen
Johnny Cash, I'm On fire 

CD - Sped 525

Track List 

1. Nebraska --- Chrissie Hynde and Adam Seymour
2. Atlantic ---- Hank #3 
3. Mansion On The Hill ----Crooked Fingers
4. Johnny 99 ---- Los Lobos 
5. Highway Patrolman --- Dar Williams 
6. State Trooper ----Deana Carter 
7. Used Cars ----- Ani Duranco 
8. Open All Night ---- Son Volt
9. My Fathers House ---- Ben Harpper 
10. Reason To Believe ---  Aimee Mann and Michael Penn

Bonus Tracks 

1. I'm On Fire ----Johnny Cash 
2. Downbound Train ---- Raul Malo of the Mavericks
3. Wages Of Sin --- Damen Jurado and Rose Thomas 

CD Liner Notes

Sometimes it seems a bit curious that of all Bruce Springsteen’s greatest recordings. A is Nebraska that is considered to be his most acclaimed masterwork. Now this album, mind you, that was recorded in 1981 on a four-track tape machine in his New Jersey bedroom. It is the album that sounded like a demo, which it originally was, work, but with meticulously layered arrangements, thick instruments, and a gorgeous sense of style, Nebraska at frist listen, appeared to be the kind of record that could ruin a career rather than run it up the most.

My guess is that Nebraska must stand by itself in order for one to grasp the genius that runs through it. Unlike Born To Run, Tunnel of Love, or even Born In the U.S.A., Nebraska is rough-edged and raw. It’ll cut you if you are not careful, and push you around. The song are filled with anti-heroes and characters hell bent on self destruction. From the cold-blooded candor of the title track, to the eerie starkness of “State Trooper.” Sprinstein’s song-stories are downright chilling. It was as if in the songs he tried to reconstruct the tortured world of bluesmen like Robert Johnson where demons roamed recklessly, the night never saw a star, and even good people were poisoned by bad luck and malice. Was there hope for a better life? Promise Land this wasn’t.

Living in New Jersey Shore for most of my life, I, like others, had come of age listening to Sringsteen. He had given us the means by which we better understood our culture and community. Early albums such as “Greetings From Asbury N.J.” “The Wild, the innocent and the E Street Shuffle’, and Born to Run bled Jersey. Springsteen was the local poet laureate, the one who made sense of things and chronicled the best and worst pf them. But on darkness on the Edge of Town and The River, springsteen’s had broadened his songs cape. Tunes about America, not Jersey, populated these records; they revealed Springsteen’s maturity as a songwriter. Tunes by the time Nebraska had rolled around, Springsteen’s themes possessed a powerful universality, yet he had continued to use New Jersey as a microcosm of America. Many of the characters and locales are locales are Jersey-based, but their stories were much bigger than the garden State.

Nebraska forced listeners to travel America’s underbelly, a disturbing place where dreams seemed busted before they were even born and people lived in fear of their fate and themselves. I learned as much from Nebraska as I did from any book America, and if you listened intently to the album, you probably felt the same way. 

Now on this album, some of those very songwriters – Ani Difranco, Johnny Cash, Chrissie Hynde, Los Lobos – get the special chance to re-visit Nebraska and to carve their musical initials into a masterpiece. They get to re-examine the album’s soul, revitalize its spirit, cause new sounds to run through it, and most important, introduce this seminal set of songs to their fans, some of which might with Nebraska as they should be.

As for those of us who years embraced Nebraska as a work of remarkable clarity and courage that stands next to the best that Johnson, Guthrie, Dylan have given us, well, consider this album a long overdue encore.

Bruce Springsteen's Biography 

His music has been called “Dylan-like.” But even Bob Dylan has not had the support and the fans that Bruce Springsteen has. To this day, almost three decades after releasing is first album, Bruce Springsteen still sells out stadiums in minutes, and still puts on what some consider the best show ever. 

Born to a working class family in Long Beach, New Jersey in 1949, Springsteen fell in love with rock ‘n roll after watching the Ed Sullivan Show one night. Elvis performed that night, and inspired the “Boss” to start a career in music. He joined his first band in 1965, and despite the wishes of his father, began jumping around with different bands in the New Jersey seaside town of Asbury Park. Those battles with his father inspired some of Springsteen’s best loved songs.

And as he played with these different bands, he started to hook up with the musicians who would eventually comprise the E-Street Band.

When the family moved to California, Springsteen joined them, but only briefly. In 1972, he returned to the East Coast and signed a management deal with a producer named Mike Appeal. The contact with Appeal led to an audition with an executive at Columbia Records…. the same record label that signed Bob Dylan. Liking what he heard, the executive, John Hammond, decided to take a chance and signed Springsteen to a contract. In 1973, the first album came out, Greetings From Asbury Park, and quickly earned Springsteen the title of the “new Dylan.” Springsteen's follow-up, The Wild, the Innocent, and the E Street Shuffle, was released later the same year to even greater acclaim. The third album, Born To Run, landed Springsteen on the covers of Time and Newsweek. After a tour a two year legal battle with his first agent, Mike Appeal, Springsteen hit the studio again. This time the result was Darkness On The Edge Of Town, with the popular songs Badlands, Racing In The Street and The Promised Land. 

By this time, Springsteen was on the verge of becoming a major commercial force, and his next album, The River, became Springsteen’s first number one album. But despite this popular records, Springsteen to this day is still know for the album he released in 1984, Born In The USA. One of the biggest selling records of all-time, Born In The USA produced seven top 10 singles, including Dancing In The Dark and the title song, Born In The USA. At the peak of his popularity, Springsteen married Julianne Phillips and released the five-LP, three-CD set, Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band: Live 1975-1985, which debuted at number 1 on the charts. The Phillips marriage did not last, and in 1991 Springsteen married backup singer Patti Scialfa.

In 1993 Springsteen recorded the acoustic hit "Streets of Philadelphia." The theme song to the Tom Hanks film Philadelphia, earned him an Oscar and four Grammys. The years of hard work and long tours finally paid off in 1999 when he was inducted in the Rock & Roll Hall Of Fame. 

On September 12, Willie Nelson will release his first .

Revised: September 03, 2007