Springtime for Springnuts

Grant Sharples offers a personal account of the Boss’s career and legacy in light of the new biopic “Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere.”

By Grant SharplesNovember 11, 2025

• Film

• Music

BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN IS just beyond those doors. We’re sure of it. When we try to enter the Stone Pony to grab a vacation souvenir and absorb the vaunted atmosphere of a legendary venue, a solemn security guard turns us away. “Sorry, we’re closed for the day,” he informs us. Terry, my father-in-law, mentions that they’re supposed to be open for another hour, according to their online listing. But his efforts are in vain. The guard tells us they’re filming something, but he’s not allowed to disclose what it is. Immediately, Peggy, my mother-in-law, turns around and looks at all of us: my wife, me, my father-in-law, my sister-in-law, her boyfriend. “Yup, he’s in there,” she says, still within earshot of the hired muscle.

To commemorate this thrilling event, Peggy and Terry stand in front of the venue while we snap their photo. I joke that they technically got a picture with the Boss; you just can’t see him. We give the guard a polite wave and resume our walk down Ocean Avenue toward Wonder Bar, another destination known for its Springsteen associations. En route to our next stop, the six of us excitedly trade hypotheses on what’s going on in that building, the salty aromas of the nearby Atlantic lingering in the air like the Boss’s presumed presence.

Later that month, we discover that we had been right. Time had just published a cover story on him, replete with a photo shoot inside the Stone Pony, the hallowed grounds that instigated his decades-long career. He had even been greeting passersby on the boardwalk, where we had walked mere hours before our failed Pony patronage. When the feature goes live, Peggy texts all of us the link. Our family chat is called “Springnuts,” named after the popular Facebook group that Peggy and Terry are members of and follow closely. This has been the de facto name of our ensemble since early 2023, when we made the four-hour trek from Kansas City, Missouri, to Tulsa, Oklahoma, to see him perform with the E Street Band twice in the span of a week. Peggy and Terry went a step further and caught him in Chicago and San Diego. As of this writing, they’ve seen him in five states, including an intimate performance during his stint on Broadway, plus another at Madison Square Garden, where they miraculously witnessed him perform “Jungleland,” the Born to Run (1975) closing track that remains a rare gem in his set lists. Europe, where he plays to even larger audiences, is their next goal on the docket.

As you may have gleaned, Springsteen’s music plays a lofty role in this family. Since I started dating my now-wife Rachel when we were both in high school, her parents have slowly indoctrinated me into this fervent fandom. Their instruction started when I met them and they played “Born to Run” on their home speakers. Peggy turned to me and asked if I could play this song on drums. It continued when we discussed the iconic gated snare on “Born in the U.S.A.” At that point, we had momentum: they bought me 1995’s Greatest Hits on vinyl as a college graduation present; they took Rachel and me to see Blinded by the Light (2019) in theaters and lent me a copy of Springsteen’s autobiography; they named their new bichon frise after the song “Rosalita,” and she became a permanent fixture of our home; Terry gifted me his prized Live/1975–85 box set; they’d queue up “Lucky Man” for its “snake eyes” line whenever it was time to play double ones in Mexican Train dominoes; they took us to see him in Kansas City and Tulsa. Going to Asbury Park, New Jersey, with them in late August–early September felt like a culmination, what all of this had been leading up to.

Before I started dating Rachel, the family would take annual trips to Ocean Grove, a one-square-mile beach town adjacent to Asbury Park. One of Peggy’s brothers had bought a house by the shore, and they visited Ocean Grove every summer until Rachel was a teenager, around the time that we met in a science class and her great-uncle sold the house and decamped to Florida for retirement. This past holiday season, my bonus parents announced that they were taking us to the very same house, which Peggy had found on Airbnb, that next summer. It would be my first time in the Garden State, a place where Springsteen’s footprint is as enduring and indelible as an ink stamp. Over the past decade or so, they’ve successfully managed to convert this indie-rock guy into a staunch Springnut.

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Even if you’re not a devoted Springnut like myself or my in-laws, the Boss has recently inched toward unequivocally Taylor Swiftian levels of contemporary ubiquity. Despite the inarguable commercial and critical apogee of his 1970s and ’80s output, the 2020s have felt particularly Bruce-inclined. Obviously, there’s the music. Since the start of the decade, we’ve received 2020’s Letter to You (a notable entry for his reunion with the E Street Band, if not for its own merits), Only the Strong Survive (2022’s R & B covers record), and two resuscitations of previously bygone material (this year’s Tracks II: The Lost Albums and Nebraska ’82: Expanded Edition, both of which come armed with songs from the vault), alongside a smattering of less-essential additions, such as a 2024 best-of compilation, an anti-Trump EP, and official bootlegs available on his website. He has even confirmed that Tracks III is finished and on the way.

There was the massive 2023–24 tour, one of a handful of events in which a septuagenarian routinely busted his shirt open to uproarious applause. There were two documentaries, one of which centered on that tour, each with their own soundtracks. There were two books: one by Steven Hyden that explores the omnipresence and legacy of 1984’s commercial juggernaut Born in the U.S.A., and one by Warren Zanes that traces the origins of 1982’s subdued and chart-agnostic Nebraska. Like your film-bro cousin, Springsteen also got into podcasting, except he co-hosted his podcast alongside a war criminal, shortly before becoming engrossed in an online feud with a different war criminal from the other political wing.

Now, he’s riding the resurgent wave of musician-focused biopics with the filmic adaptation of Zanes’s book. This is a movie that, despite its subpar critical reception, our family found deeply moving for its explorations of cyclical trauma, art versus commerce, and artistic introspection. Admittedly, some of director Scott Cooper’s creative choices are trite: casting flashback scenes in black-and-white, Jeremy Allen White’s Springsteen crossing out third-person pronouns and replacing them with first-person ones in his lyrics, the mandatory but ultimately fictitious romance. But it’s leagues ahead of the typical biopic fare. Its narrow focus grants it heft. Rather than spreading itself thin in the vein of Bohemian Rhapsody’s Freddie Mercury (2018), it casts a smaller net like A Complete Unknown (2024) did with Bob Dylan. It’s a deeply emotional portrait of a man lost in his own mind, replaying moments from his formative years, trying to untangle the memories that ensnare him.

Suffice to say that the decade’s media landscape has been particularly Springsteen-minded. Why all of this now? Why a blockbuster movie, starring zeitgeisty actors like Jeremies Allen White and Strong, on the making of his most anti-blockbuster album?

A modern infatuation with a classic work, ultimately, speaks to its intrinsic timelessness. In this case, the gloomy milieu of Nebraska has lent itself well to a graceful aging process, simultaneously for its lyrical despondency (what’s that say about these times, huh!) and for its stripped-down sonics (similar to how stylish, hand-drawn animation feels less dated than “live-action” CGI in the ensuing years; this is a Disney subtweet). Equipped with a TASCAM Portastudio four-track, an Echoplex, and a couple of microphones in his Colts Neck, New Jersey, house, Springsteen recorded a suite of demos whose instrumentation almost exclusively comprises acoustic guitar, vocals, and harmonica, save for some glockenspiel, mandolin, and synthesizer on a few songs.

These songs were originally intended for the E Street Band (a recording of their renditions, colloquially known as Electric Nebraska, was also just released) but Springsteen famously preferred the lived-in, intimate qualities of those demos. As the story goes, he released those demos instead, much to the chagrin of the suits at Columbia Records, who were eager for the Boss to continue his radio-friendly run and pick up where he left off with his 1980 double LP, The River, and its lead single, “Hungry Heart,” his highest-charting song at the time. Jon Landau, the rock critic who became his manager, vouched for Springsteen’s artistic integrity. Landau was adamant that this was the album Bruce wanted to submit. There would be no compromises. No arena anthems. No larger-than-life hooks to shout at the top of your lungs. No showman histrionics. Before he went on to make an album that yielded seven singles with those aforementioned traits, he needed to get this out of his system. Fortunately, even Springsteen’s demos are worthy of close listening. Even his impulsive instincts produce music that is heart-wrenching, harrowing, and hypnotic.

Alienation, grief, and romance are eternal themes for Springsteen; they are in almost all of his music, but the sparse arrangements on Nebraska make them particularly identifiable and potent. With almost nothing to adorn them save for the man’s voice, guitar, and the natural reverb of the room he’s playing in, the songs’ emotional resonance takes center stage. That resonance is an invariable facet of Springsteen’s best work, but it presents itself differently on Nebraska. Take a song like “Working on the Highway,” a brisk rockabilly tune from Born in the U.S.A. that explores an underage relationship and prison labor. In the pared-down demo version from Nebraska’s outtakes, you can hear Springsteen’s hand banging the rhythm out on his acoustic guitar. Here, the track matches the darkness at the song’s core. Spiritually, it blends seamlessly with Nebraska’s frayed, lugubrious fabric.

Those ideas translate musically too. On the Nebraska version of “Atlantic City,” you can hear the wisps of what could have been, both in its narrator’s hopes for a future free from gambling debt and in the faint contours of a pop song that would never become a major hit. The minimalism augments the sorrow, outlining the diminishing possibilities. The murderous spree that dominates “Johnny 99” sounds much more frightening when soundtracked by Springsteen solo—the arrangement, reduced to a fundamental, almost primal level of urgency, ends up effectively replicating the song’s lone-wolf mentality. “State Trooper,” with its punctured howls and menacing undertones, is equally chilling, taking clear cues from Springsteen’s stated inspiration, the avant-garde synth-punks Suicide.

Nebraska is my favorite Springsteen album precisely because of how much it stands out in his catalog and because of its canny balance of stark truths and hazy ambience. My in-laws have never cared for it as much as his other records, such as Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J. (1972), Born to Run, or even his latter-day gem Wrecking Ball (2012). They prefer his more immediate material, outfitted with the sweeping hooks and arena-sized earworms. But there’s something appealing to me about the insularity of Nebraska, how it challenges you to receive its iniquities laid bare. The ghost of a full band only foregrounds Springsteen’s disturbing tales of the luckless, bereft, and nefarious characters who occupy these stories. But there’s something more optimistic lying there too, in a micro and macro sense. The songs themselves may be, yes, total downers, but they’re also a document of a man who believed in his art and was hell-bent on expressing it however he deemed fit, label heads be damned.

My in-laws witnessed Springsteen’s rise as it happened in real time, but I have had the privilege of watching a new Springsteen-fueled renaissance take place, one that reckons with his legacy and impact through a retrospective lens. Their initial appreciation of Springsteen wasn’t shaped by broad, external factors like his pop-cultural import or his palpable influence on latter-day artists. Inevitably, my own fandom has taken a wider outlook from its inception. When I listen to his work, I can hear its echoes in the present day, carried into bands that emerged in the 21st century like treasured heirlooms inherited from beloved relatives. I hear it in the Gaslight Anthem, the War on Drugs, Titus Andronicus, the Hold Steady, Wild Pink, Gang of Youths. Just as my in-laws have invited me into the Springsteen orbit, I’ve shown them some of these bands, pointing out the tangible imprint the Boss has had on these modern musicians. This is the beauty of art, of sharing it with the people you love. There’s always something different to be found within it. Books to be lent. Box sets to be gifted. Concerts to be experienced. Dogs to be named. Vacations to be had. Great art transcends. It gets passed down through the generations while gesturing toward the future. Even after it dies, it someday comes back.