This is now a music review newsletter

Uncharacteristically, I showed up to work on Friday in a graphic tee—a shirt with Springsteen and the E Street Band plastered across it, that is. Friday’s headline release was Deliver Me From Nowhere, the Springsteen biopic starring Jeremy Allen White. I’ll see it eventually, when it comes to Bytowne.

But coinciding with the film’s first day in theatres was the release of Nebraska ’82: Expanded Edition: outtakes, the fabled “Electric Nebraska” sessions, a 2025 re-recording, and a remastered edition of one of Springsteen’s greatest albums. Critical coverage of the album aligns with my own feelings—the original Nebraska is hard to beat, but these additional pieces add depth and context to the familiar songs.

The “Electric Nebraska” recordings are a hoot. If you’re looking for “E Street plays Nebraska”, you’re better off piecing together the band’s performances of the songs from Springsteen’s live shows over the decades. (The November 2012 Omaha show features a few of the rarer tracks.) But if you’re open to a laughingly different vision of what the album could’ve been, you’re in for a treat.

The re-recording is one of the more intriguing parts of the album. Though many of Springsteen’s songs have an eternal-feeling subject matter, and he certainly played them with heart in his mid-30s, they gain depth when sung again by the same singer (though with a different voice) some forty years on. Having listened to many, many concert recordings, I think some of the Boss’s best shows have come in recent decades, as he returns to familiar songs with that much more life under his belt. So, too, for the re-recorded Nebraska.

Springsteen remains, as a friend once put it to me, “unironically good”.

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Thanks for indulging that. On with some links!

• Ahaha, of course the Ford government would consider removing security of tenure from residential rentals.
  • Between this and the Quebec constitution, lots of provinces introducing policies from nowhere without consultation. The rationale for Ontario’s is so flimsy, barely worth a breath.
  • As a renter, I’m personally very invested in this one! Ontario has some of the best tenant protections in the country. Yes, there can be problem tenants, but the power balance in renting still tends invariably toward the landlord—being insecure in your home is deeply destabilizing. These potential changes (about which we can only imagine the worst, because there are simply no details) would flip that dynamic on its head, putting yet more power in the hands of landlords.
• Paul Wells recalls the lead-up to the 1995 referendum, reflecting on the power of an emotional politics (and for getting out and speaking with folks).
• Sameer’s latest has some opening words on collecting objects. This arrived at a good time, as I’ve felt increasingly unsettled by how many things we have, many of which we don’t touch in the course of a year. There’s a weight to that, and a future obligation—whether when moving or otherwise, you’ll some day have to decide what to do with each object around you. Sameer’s reflection on collecting offers a thoughtful nudge against that feeling (even as he himself professes a preference toward getting rid of things).
• I like this, making rules for your online (or wherever) behaviour as a creative constraint, but also being okay with breaking them sometimes.
• Huge kudos to the City of Gatineau for having some excellent open data, including an “Adresses d’immeubles” dataset with… all the addresses??
• I’m always keen to go behind the scenes in book publishing—if you are, too, learn from Ken Whyte about book distribution.
• Speaking of books, now I need to go self print and bind some books (via Christopher Schwarz who has a goal to one day release all his books for free).

All the best for the week ahead! Listen to some Springsteen!

Lucas