Springsteen’s Deliver Me From Nowhere: Behind the Sound

As Tod Maitland began the sound-mixing process for Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere, he knew he had to go right to the source: the Boss himself.

“We talked right from the get-go, finding out if he was using headphones during his sessions, how Bruce worked with the microphones, how he recorded the takes. Bruce was very involved; he really wanted this thing to sound exactly like what he did,” explains Maitland, a six-time Oscar nominee for best sound.

The process was the polar opposite of Maitland’s previous film, James Mangold’s Bob Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown, for which he never met the elusive rock legend. But tasked with helping replicate Nebraska, the most intimate album of Springsteen’s career, Maitland found that extra access vital.

Unlike in the usual musical biopic, where the hero is often depicted performing anthems before thousands of screaming fans in a crowd, most of Deliver Me From Nowhere shows Springsteen, played by Jeremy Allen White, in solitude, with little more than a guitar, harmonica and raw vocals as he lays his soul bare. The setting gave Maitland his biggest challenge, leaving very little room for smoke and mirrors or any margin of error.

“That was the most important part of it: There’s not much to distract you from the guitar and the voice. Focusing on those two elements, that’s the main job,” he says. “You’re making a movie, but we’re making an album at the same time. And when you make an album, you focus on every little nuance. With A Complete Unknown, we had many things happening at the same time, except for a couple of scenes, but here, except for those moments inside the power plant and onstage, we really don’t have much of that.”

Aside from consulting Springsteen, Maitland studied Nebraska himself, choosing period-appropriate mics to record with and even running recordings through his present-day equipment and an old TEAC recorder so they could have that same “out of sync” quality as vintage cassette recordings for reference.

Maitland says director Scott Cooper “never wanted it to be just Jeremy or just Bruce [for the vocals]. He wanted it to be Jeremy with this haunting Bruce element to it throughout everything.”