Warren Zanes would not have called himself a writer in college.
Despite his laurels — prizes for fiction writing and academic achievement at Loyola University — a potent fear of failure racked his conscience. He supposed being published in The New Yorker might legitimize him, or at least soften his critical eye toward himself, but he hadn’t submitted any of his writing to the magazine. More than dispiriting, his fear was paralyzing.
When an idea flits into his mind now, he treats writing — and rewriting — as a certainty and harbors no reservations about putting words on a page almost immediately. His process is uneven and iterative, a ritual in “always backing up.”
Zanes told a rapt audience at Red River Theatres last Saturday that he wrote his book on rock legend Bruce Springsteen twice. His first manuscript was double the length of his published work, “Deliver Me from Nowhere: The Making of Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska.”
His editor and agent met his first draft with silence. They called him to discuss it one day, and he had a new first page written the next.
Zanes’s book became the basis for director Scott Cooper’s “Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere,” a biopic released in late October and received with buzzing excitement in Zanes’s hometown of Concord.
“You fill out forms and it says ‘occupation.’ I couldn’t put writer for years. It’s really only pretty recently that I’ve been able to,” Zanes told the Monitor. “Part of it might be aging, part of it might be that at a certain point, you’ve got a few books on the shelf with your name on them, and you may as well.”
A Q&A following the sold-out 4 p.m. showing last Saturday probed the author’s proximity to Springsteen and involvement in the movie-making process, as well as his personal history and connection to Concord.
He also discussed his late mother, Hope Zanes Butterworth, known to the community for her commitment to Concord institutions like The Friendly Kitchen and Red River Theatres and cherished by her children for cultivating an unconventional family life alive with artistic verve.
At his family’s house on Stickney Hill Road, where cows, chickens and pigs roamed and his mother became a “real country woman,” Zanes’s appreciation for music matured from that of a listener to that of a player. The family’s barn housed an old stereo, a drum kit and his brother’s electric guitar and amplifier.
Zanes learned to play without formal instruction and went on to join his brother’s rock band, the Del Fuegos, record three albums for Warner Brothers and tour with Tom Petty, the subject of an earlier biography by Zanes.
When he considers the unlikely trajectory of his professional life, he walks his mind back to his mother’s house.
“You couldn’t live in that house and think a whole lot about accounting,” he said.
The bulk of the material he obtained from Bruce Springsteen for his biography came from one day-long interview, an extended conversation they shared in one of the lounges of Springsteen’s New Jersey home, with Zanes’s tape recorder running in the background.
Zanes, who now lives in Montclair, New Jersey, and teaches at New York University, has returned to Springsteen’s house on other occassions. Sometimes as he drives away, he permits himself to engage with the younger version of himself living inside him, the same child who relished playing “Born to Run” on the turntable in the barn.
“I’m a believer that our former selves are active within us still. It’s not that we depart from those positions, it’s that we add another layer on top,” he said. “Somewhere in me is the kid in Concord, New Hampshire, who grew up listening to Bruce Springsteen records… There’s some gratitude for the wonder of life that brought me into this situation as an adult.”
As he read Springsteen’s memoir several years ago, the idea for a book on the singer’s brooding “Nebraska” record took ahold. Springsteen revealed little about the album in his retelling of his life, but he described experiencing a period of profound emotional desolation during a road trip from New Jersey to Los Angeles.
Zanes divined the connection between Springsteen’s depressive episode and the troubled tenor of “Nebraska.”
“I just know enough about the making of art to know that in a lot of the most vibrant art, people have to go to vibrant places. That could be places of pain, it could be places of joy. I really sensed with “Nebraska” that Bruce had been in a particularly painful place,” he said.
Zanes himself had recently been in a painful place when he embarked on his exploration of Springsteen’s “Nebraska.” Within the span of about a year, he had lost a job, a marriage and a father he didn’t know well.
His instinct was to reach for “Nebraska.”
“I was just like the people in the songs of ‘Nebraska.’ They are people who have lost hope. They’re despairing people,” he told the audience at Red River Theatres. “They’re out on the margins and they’re not coming back.”
Zanes obtained all the access he needed once Springsteen was on board with the project. His book was released in May of 2023. The movie, starring Jeremy Allen White as Springsteen, explores the same haunted period in the singer’s adulthood.
“He became like a collaborator, which doesn’t always happen in interviews,” Zanes said of Springsteen. “He was my guide, and I was just following him.”
