“Nebraska” by Bruce Springsteen

The title song of Bruce Springsteen's Nebraska, which Columbia issued in September 1982, sets the tone for an LP full of criminals and desperate people, and it does the job with next to nothing: Springsteen alone with his voice and a guitar, on a record where acoustic guitar and harmonica are all the accompaniment there is. He produced it himself, and Mike Batlan is credited with the recording.

He sings it in the first person as Charles Starkweather, who along with Caril Ann Fugate, his teenage girlfriend, killed 11 people across eight days in 1958; the song counts 10 dead, because Starkweather had already killed a man before the two of them met. He'd been reading Flannery O'Connor before writing these songs, and you can hear her in the clipped, unflinching language and in a narrator who reaches for violence without ever quite understanding why.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.