In 1982, Pat Halpin was working as a bike messenger in Seattle and getting ready to start a degree program in ultrasonography. He was already a fan of Bruce Springsteen when a new record, titled “Nebraska,” came out.
Halpin, who now lives in Norwich, listened over and over to the album’s 10 songs, which trace the contours of a series of bent and broken American lives told in the first person.
“The more I listened to it, the more I realized it had a theme to it,” Halpin said. “The starkness, the stripped down voice, it appealed to me.”
“Nebraska” is having a moment. “Deliver Me From Nowhere,” Warren Zanes’ 2024 book about how Springsteen made the record, was adapted into a movie that hit streaming services this week.
Inspired in part by a tribute to Joni Mitchell’s album “Blue” that three area musicians put together in 2018, Halpin has pulled together his own concert in tribute to Springsteen’s landmark recording.
Five Upper Valley musicians will each play two songs from “Nebraska” at 7 p.m. Sunday at the Briggs Opera House in White River Junction.
The musicians on Sunday’s bill cover the local singer-songwriter landscape: Pop singer and Royalton resident Ali T; Western Terrestrials frontman Nick Charyk, of Sharon; Enfield native and former Nashville resident Brooks Hubbard; Krishna Guthrie, a descendant of folk music royalty now living in Bethel; and Jim Yeager, a Windsor-based singer-songwriter.
Their involvement with “Nebraska” varies. For some, the record is a kind of touchstone. Halpin recruited the musicians over the summer. Hubbard, when asked, picked up his guitar and played a song from the album, Halpin said.
Charyk holds “Nebraska” in such high esteem that he’s never tried to play any of it in front of an audience, though he’s played them all while on his own or warming up for a show.
“It’s a big one for me,” he said. “When I was a teenager, it was the first Springsteen album that appealed to me.”
He listened mainly to punk at the time. “Someone got me to listen to ‘Nebraska’ and it just blew my mind,” he said.
It opened doors to other songs in the same vein, looking back to Woody Guthrie, and it turned him on the Springsteen’s other work.
“I sort of worked backward chronologically,” he said, listening to “Darkness on the Edge of Town,” from 1978, and “Born to Run,” from 1975.
For Sunday’s show, Charyk is singing “Johnny 99” and “State Trooper,” two songs told from the wrong side of the law. The latter is one of two songs on “Nebraska” that contain the line “Deliver me from nowhere.”
As eager as he is to play the two songs, Charyk plans to be an avid listener. “The pleasure for me is watching these other artists I respect, watching them put their stamp on these songs,” he said.
The bright spotlight on “Nebraska” stems from the odd place it occupies in Springsteen’s work. He had cemented his place in rock music with his previous album, “The River,” and subsequent tour when he holed up in a house in Colts Neck, N.J., to write some new songs.
His plan was to record some demos to bring to a recording session with his E Street Band, but the resulting songs, influenced by neo-noir films of the 1970s and by the work of novelists John Steinbeck and Flannery O’Connor, didn’t lend themselves to the big sound of the full band. Springsteen also was suffering from a bout of clinical depression, Halpin said.
In his book, Zanes called “Nebraska” “the greatest left-hand turn in rock ‘n’ roll history,” Halpin said. The album consists of 10 of the 17 songs Springsteen recorded in Colts Neck, straight from the demo. It was released with no publicity. Springsteen didn’t go on tour, and the lone video, for “Atlantic City,” adhered to two rules the singer laid down, Halpin said: That he wouldn’t be in it, and it’s in black and white.
As powerful as the record is for Springsteen’s fans, “Nebraska” remains largely unknown to people familiar with the Boss’ work only from hearing it on the radio or in the background at a bar.
“I hadn’t listened to the whole album,” Alison “Ali T” Turner said. Halpin approached her at a show in June to ask her if she’d be interested in participating in the “Nebraska” tribute.
When she did listen to it, she ran into a common complaint about it — that it can seem a bit monochromatic.
“I’m more of a melody person,” Turner, who’s in her early 30s, said. On “Nebraska,” “I thought, ‘Oh, all the songs sound kind of the same to me.'”
But the lyrics are so raw and emotionally honest that the songs have their own kind of appeal.
She’s singing two of the more upbeat songs on “Nebraska”: “Used Car,” which is told from a the point of view of a child whose family is buying a “new used car,” and “Reason to Believe,” the record’s closing song, and a chronicle of what keeps people getting out of bed in the morning.
The refrain of “Used Car” — “The day the lottery I win / I ain’t never going to ride in a used car again” — is particularly graceful, Turner said.
Because the songs are so straightforward, Turner said, it didn’t take a lot of work to adapt them. She wants to retain Springsteen’s phrasing. “I really tried to do that justice,” she said. “The rest of it is just playing my guitar and doing my thing.”
Sunday’s show is the first Halpin, 72, has assembled, and he is, understandably, eager to hear the results.
“I told the musicians, ‘Do the songs any way you want,’ ” he said.
Halpin will introduce the record and talk about it between songs. There’s a lot to say about such a revolutionary recording. “It’s probably the first time a major artist did something like this,” he said.
A Celebration of the Music of ‘Nebraska’ is scheduled for 7 p.m. Sunday, Dec. 28, in the Briggs Opera House in White River Junction. For tickets ($15 in advance; $20 at the door) go to ticketleap.events/tickets/phalpin23gmailcom/nebraska-949507057.