Based on Bruce Springsteen’s 1982 album “Nebraska,” Tennessee Jones—who was three years old when the album came out—uses interlinked short stories to explore the changing face of America over the two decades since it’s release. From the closing of the auto plants to the coming of age of the GLBT movement, the forces behind American’s changing lives find expression in Jones’ diverse characters. From the portrait of a man laid off an auto plant—who fantasizes about eating the car he helped build—to the twelve year old boy who watches his father’s red-river baptism and understands the connection between work and death, Jones uncompromising visions present a brave new view of the shifting territory between gender and class, power and death. A testament to how rock music and literature influence and borrow from one another, Deliver me from Nowhere is as much influenced by Flannery O’Connor and John Steinbeck as it is by Bruce Springsteen, Johnny Cash, Patti Smith, and traditional gospel hymns. Infused with the urgency of rock n’ roll and the restraint of poetry, Tennessee Jones’ unforgettable stories manage to extract the thread of religion that runs through the American experience of rock and roll.
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