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Bruce Springsteen today released Inside Nebraska ’82: Expanded Edition, a mini-documentary which will be released as part of the Nebraska box set coming this week, timed to the release of filmmaker Scott Cooper’s Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere.

That film, which stars Jeremy Allen White as Springsteen, is based on the book Deliver Me From Nowhere by Warren Zanes, which documented the making of Nebraska, as well as the mental health crisis Springsteen underwent during that same period.

Zanes, a musician and rock journalist, wrote the definitive story of Nebraska, and Cooper optioned it almost immediately, after a visit in New Jersey with Springsteen, Zanes, and Springsteen’s longtime agent and confidant Jon Landau.

Nebraska, Springsteen’s first album without the E Street Band, was released in between The River (1980) and Born in the U.S.A. (1984), the two albums that would make him a global superstar. Recorded in a rented house on a pro-sumer 4-track recorder, the songs of Nebraska were originally supposed to be demos. Springsteen brought them to the band, but ultimately couldn’t capture the desolation of the songs in the “electric” recordings.

After sending the band home and struggling with a solo record, Springsteen ultimately released the demo tape instead, creating a unique and striking sound that was unlike anything Springsteen had recorded before.

For decades, Springsteen’s fans have asked for a peek behind the curtain at “Electric Nebraska,” the E Street recording sessions that would, presumably, give a wildly different take on the record’s songs. Springsteen maintained that those recordings had long since been discarded, and that their existence was essentially an urban legend. With the movie looming, though, he went digging around in the vaults and actually found something.

Nebraska ’82: Expanded Edition will include a remastered version of Nebraska, a disc of the E Street Band’s Nebraska sessions titled Electric Nebraska, a number of other outtakes from the record, and a video of Springsteen performing the songs, solo and acoustic, in an empty theater in 2025.