"The River tour ended with two shows in Cincinnati in mid-September 1981, after which the entire band traveled to Hawaii to celebrate Clarence Clemons's wedding (...).
Returning to his latest rental house in New Jersey, he contemplated the posttour silence with mixed feelings.
Finally flush with the long delayed rewards of rock stardom, he had the financial freedom to do virtually anything he could imagine. Except for that he couldn't imagine anything he wanted to do other than to write and record a new album, or be on the road (...).
'It was definitely a closing to a certain earlier section of my life, the initial section of the traveling and touring and those early records,' Bruce says. 'There was more contemplation. I was thirty or thirty-one, and something turned me back around toward my early childhood. that moved me into
Nebraska, so that was pretty telling. I'm not sure what brought that music around, really."
Probably the same thing that compelled him, night after night, to climb into his car and drive the streets of Freehold, visiting the empty space on Randolph Street, where he had once lived with his grandparents; the duplex on Institute Street where he had been a schoolboy; and then the duplex on South Street where he'd lived as a teenager. He has no idea what he was looking for, Bruce admitted later. But that didn't stop him from going back."
