So here we are already yanking out entire albums named after places. So soon, we’re out of ideas?

It’s not quite so bad. This week it’s Bruce Springsteen’s “Nebraska,” from his album Nebraska. It’s a dark tale about…eh, do we care? Ostensibly some nihilistic dirtbag who – and this is so sad – had to work for a living and resented it. Plus his dirtbag girl-doll Caril Ann Fugate, described in a very pleasing understatement by MurderPedia as “not much of a scholar”.

But Nebraska holds up as a great exercise in style and career development for The Boss. Those two wind-swept dopes don’t deserve the acetate, but the record signaled a shift in Springsteen from anthemic rock bombast to…folk bombast. Progress! Question mark.

Either way the choice to wind the story of those two murdery clods through various arid, dark, scary, acoustic prairie-scapes was a good one, allowing Springsteen to draw out arid, dark, scary, rural Nebraska goings-on.

That he wanted us to somehow care about how those drawling nudniks felt about the world or their impulses and impeti is Springsteen’s problem. Listening to the record itself, though, and this track, its microcosm, it’s easy to find oneself lurking (innocently, ideally) in the black nights in which this terrible shit went down. And that’s the point of mapping these songs after all.

MAPPING IT

So “Nebraska” goes down at 924 Belmont in Lincoln, NE, cited in this Lincoln Journal-Star article as the location of the murder of the Fugate family.

HEARING IT

Then isten to it and imagine yourself out in an Oklahoma nighttime, holding up a gas station or murdering your parents or wutevz: