This book is a visual and emotional interpretation of the four albums Bruce Springsteen made from 1975 to 1982: Born To Run (1975), Darkness On The Edge Of Town (1978), The River (1980), and Nebraska (1982). Springsteen made each of these albums to build thematically on the previous one, carrying similar characters through emotional landscapes that reflect his own struggle to find a life worth living and his determination to give voice to those who were losing that fight. Materiality was a key part of the book’s design. The lyrics throughout the book were typed on my dad’s old typewriter, and assembled page by page which freed the layout to be more organic. The paper stock, image choice, and tone change with each album, with a key design element unique to each one.
Many of Born To Run's song titles were purposefully cinematic and Springsteen took the title of the song "Thunder Road" from a movie poster he saw. I used the lettering from that film's title card to create a nostalgic, cinematic opening for the album, and then repeated the motif, printed on acetate, and created a title card for the opening track of Side Two, "Born To Run", and the album's closing track "Jungleland".
For Darkness On The Edge Of Town's grittier sound and feel, I blew up the typewriter type to highlight the album's thematic slogans and brutal truths. This section was printed on newsprint to emphasize this as well, distinguishing it from the saturated production of Born To Run.
The River is a sprawling double album that focuses on relationships and the damage we do to each other when life becomes overwhelming. It is a dark and heavy album, relieved by jukebox numbers about music's power to provide a necessary escape. I used 7" record sleeves to separate the four sides of them album as a symbol of the comfort music gives the characters in the album.
The last album, Nebraska, is Springsteen's most bleak. The songs were recorded as acoustic demos and are full of echoing space. Springsteen wrote many of the songs inspired from hazy memories of things he saw as a child and much of the album feels haunted by the souls of the characters from the previous three albums.These elements combine to make Nebraska the most unique sonically of the four. I used vellum to give layers of transparency, to evoke the sense of space the album has. Blind typing on the vellum allowed me to haunt the pages with the voices of the three previous albums as well as the lost souls who are Nebraska's focus.
The appendix was an opportunity tell more about Bruce Springsteen himself and give the albums context within his career and popular music in the 1970's and 1980's.
