“State Trooper” by Bruce Springsteen

"State Trooper" lives on Nebraska, the stark 1982 album Bruce Springsteen made alone in the bedroom of his house in Colts Neck, New Jersey, cutting the songs straight to a four-track recorder. The credits are as bare as credits get: Springsteen wrote it, sings it and plays the guitar, and Mike Batlan gets the recording credit.

Those home tapes were meant as sketches for the E Street Band, but the full-band versions left Springsteen cold, so he put the originals out as they stood. This song made the cut as one of the 10 that Nebraska kept from a 17-song tape, part of a lo-fi, pitch-dark record peopled by blue-collar strugglers and outlaws, all of them waiting on a rescue that never shows.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz.