OTR, Take 56: Bruce Springsteen - Nebraska

Everything dies baby, that's a fact

Life is choice. Choice after choice, providing definition in a sea of possibilities. Brad Miller reminded me of this on Wednesday when I stated my intention to step away from regular LinkedIn posting – a timely framing as I've been ruminating on choice, consequences, and acceptance quite a lot these last few weeks.

Some of us like to think of ourselves as infinite. We want to chase every possibility, be everything to everyone, to give ourselves endlessly. In my case, I want to be a husband and a dad, a writer and a business owner, a musician and a trusted confidant, a reliable friend and sage speaker of truth – and on and on. We begin obsessing over becoming more efficient and effective at maximizing our impact.

And we burn ourselves out because despite what we believe about ourselves, we are each but one person with all of the frailty and limitations that come with that.

After many years of the burnout cycle (I am stubborn and stupidly insistent on my infinitude!), I've come not only to understand but accept that I must make choices that limit my focus to have any impact at all. Initially, I wrote "sustainable impact" and then laughed at my hubris: do you remember your great-grandmother's name? Do you remember or know anything about her? I'd guess that any "sustainable impact" lasts for, at best, two generations.

Sorry, Cula: I doubt McNugget will have any sense of who you were. (Cula's brother was named Tunis; suffice it to say I understand why I and my family members are strange. We're descended from people named Cula and Tunis, who sound like they had hard lives judging only by their names. The past is a foreign country.)

Anyway, a paradoxical freedom comes when we accept our finitude. When we accept that we cannot do everything we might be capable of doing, we are freed to do something. When we come to this recognition, we become mass murderers of our potential selves.

A man turn his back on his family,
Well he just ain't no good

For the last four or five weeks, I've been struggling with a feeling that took me until earlier this week to pin down. I suspect it's a feeling many first-time parents feel – especially if they become parents later in life after establishing something of a stable life. I also suspect we don't often acknowledge or talk about it because it can appear ungrateful or unloving.

I've been mourning the death of a version of myself and of my relationship with Audra. Certain events fundamentally change things, and bringing a child into your world is one of them. The choice to have a child – and it was a choice, excruciatingly expensive on both an emotional and financial basis – laid to rest an iteration of my life that will never come back.

Yes: my new life is wonderful and hard and joyous. I don't regret the choices I made. But in any choice like this, you do lose something. Making new wonderful friends doesn't make up for or replace a friend who passes away. We can hold two true things in our heads and hearts at once, can't we? I am so happy to be where I am and mourn some of the aspects of an exceptionally great life that I lost, never to return.

Any real choice has attendant consequences, actual stakes. Those stakes give a frame to the choice, informing us of our sometimes surprising verdict on what is most important to us.

Now mister, the day my number comes in...

I have two admissions to make:

1. I like Springsteen just fine, I guess, but I don't love him or his E-Street Band. I take that back; I mostly dislike him. This is a truth-telling zone and let's not couch it to be polite: your Jersey demigod is mostly trash.
2. When I first heard Nebraska as, I'd guess, a middle-school kid, I thought it was utter garbage.

With those stipulations made, I want to provide a little context for Nebraska and how it came about. Springsteen and his band had just done a massive tour for his double album, The River. I actively hate this album. It's got one song you've definitely heard ("Hungry Heart") and a bunch of shit that had already become cliche Springsteen. Listen to Max Weinberg's snare snap and machine-gun fills; Bittan's stocatto piano filling in the right channel, just loud enough to be heard but still background; Clarence Clemons's sax filing space because you expect a sax in a Springsteen song. There isn't much redeeming about The River. This is heresy, I know.

Springsteen drives me crazy, because when he's in full-on Springsteen mode he can be as good or as bad as anyone. The consistency is in the sound, but not in the quality of the songwriting. It's the worst kind of consistency: like how you know when you're reading a Tom Clancy book...even though he doesn't write his own books any longer. Springsteen created some pastiche of himself and only every once in a while breaks out of that self-parody to make something genuinely brilliant.

The River was a massive success, building on the success of Darkness on the Edge of Town and Born to Run. Each of those albums got progressively enervated, programmatic, and trite. Toward the end of the tour supporting The River, Bruuuuuuuuuce asked for a brand new technology: a four-track recorder. It's difficult to imagine now, in the age of having a fully functional studio on your laptop, but the emergence of a four-track, which allowed you to do multi-track home recordings on a cassete tape, was a game-changer for musicians. To this day, my favorite recordings are the home demos of songs that then mostly get spit-polished into a boring perfection in the studio.

After the tour ended, Springsteen escaped to a rented house in Colt's Neck, NJ, with his Teac Tascam 144 Portastudio. He must have been reading and watching some weird shit, because the songs that he started penning...

Last night I dreamed that I was a child
Out where the pines grow wild and tall

It is so easy to succumb to the easy thing that gets you praise. I speak only for myself here: I love being told what a clever boy I am, love the pats on the head. So that behavior is reinforced and I unthinkingly double down on it. It turns out that I'm pretty good at drafting entertaining, engaging, and sometimes insightful short, punchy stories that pass as LinkedIn posts. And lots of people told me so. I liked that, and I kept doing it.

I'm embarrassed to say how much of a part of my own conception of self this has become. And yet.

For quite some time, I've felt a nagging, background frustration and uneasiness with the whole LinkedIn game. In hindsight, looking at some of my old posts, this is glaringly obvious. Earlier this year, I had a post about being the character "Owen" that I play on LinkedIn. Now, I read that post as a warning to myself disguised as a clever tongue-in-cheek unmasking of what's actually happening on LinkedIn, the land of "authenticity."

I've known for some time that my writing for LinkedIn was affecting my ability to do the work that is most meaningful to me. I love writing OTR because it affords me a larger palate to work with: I get bored with a singular focus and find most interesting the connection of things, especially in things that might not appear to be connected. It takes time to tell those stories, to weave together strands that appear unconnected so that at the end, you realize you've been holding a single rope the whole time.

If this is the writing that interests me, fulfills me – the writing that I arrogantly think that I am unusually suited for and capable of doing – why am I training my brain for inconsequential mic drop moments on LinkedIn?

There's a place out on the edge of town, sir
Rising above the factories and the fields

Springsteen wrote and recorded the songs that formed Nebraska in that rental. The recordings are raw and spectral, haunted. He took the songs into the studio several times, looking to run them through the Springsteen song factory, seeking that studio sheen.

And they refused. The songs would not have it.

After nearly a decade of feeding the E-Street Band musical chum to turn into the same fucking song over and over. He broke the formula that was making him tons of money, bringing him adulation most musicians could only dream of. He decided to just release the original tapes, in all their imperfected glory.

One of the things that I can't quite stand about so much of Springsteen's work is the topics he writes about and the way the songs are delivered. "Factory" off Darkness on the Edge of Town is a fine song that is delivered in such a way that the working-class populism of it just doesn't hit for me. Yet there is track after track on Nebraska treading the same worn-down world-weary territory and they are absolutely riveting. Believable because of their rawness.

What I love about Nebraska is it sounds like Springsteen without the need and comfort of sugarcoating the message, without the need to gussy up the mix with a chintzy guitar solo or a sax run. Just the straight shit. No chaser.

But maybe everything that dies someday comes back

Life is about making choices, and choices have consequences. Stepping away from LinkedIn is not without risk for me, as vapid and ludicrous as that sounds. Over the two years I've been active, I've been able to drive a significant amount of business from LinkedIn by telling stories. I am hopeful that those relationships have been made and the work will continue to flow, but I don't know that it will. I'll probably pop in for a post a couple of times a month outside of Accountability Friday (funny how a throw-in thing became the keeper) to remind people I exist.

But really, I'm out here. Working on projects that mean something to me, projects that I hope will mean something to you, too. I have some ideas about how I can evolve OTR, but for right now, with all of the new responsibility in my life, I'm going to take it pretty easy.

I want you to know that you have permission to go chase the things that are meaningful to you, even if they come with a cost. The cost is often the proof that the thing you're chasing is meaningful.

Everybody talks about following your passion. I agree, but not for the reasons that most people give. Look at the meaning of the word: passion comes from the Latin and means that you must suffer for it. You do things you are passionate about because they mean enough to you that you will suffer to achieve them.

Let that be a guiding query: what is important enough to me that I will suffer for it?