The more you listen to Mustafa, you begin to realize that the juxtaposition of the gritty street life he depicts and the gentle music he makes shouldn’t be much of a juxtaposition at all. Half of the singer-songwriter’s debut project, When Smoke Rises, has been released as singles, with music videos capturing the brick and concrete exteriors of Toronto’s Regent Park housing project, where he was born and raised. In the video for “Stay Alive,” a searing portrait of his community and his commitment to it, black and brown men in chains and hoodies make elaborate hand gestures to the camera as Mustafa pleads for their survival. He offers himself to them to ensure it. “Just put down that bottle, tell me your sorrows,” he sings. “I care about you fam.” His folk-inflected music, tender and calm, and these videos, serene and defiant, honor his neighborhood with the softness so often absent in attitudes and policy towards poor people.
On “Stay Alive,” Mustafa’s friend, Regent Park rapper Rax, explains that he’s just trying to keep his head above water. “I like to hear [the song’s snippet of] my boy [Rax], who has only been equated to violence, and now people outside the community are hearing a sadness in his voice. A more holistic picture,” Mustafa said in an interview. Rax is still alive, but several people Mustafa has known are not, like rapper Smoke Dawg, pictured with him on the project’s cover, or Ali Rizeig, to whom he dedicated a single. Throughout When Smoke Rises, Mustafa’s grief for the friends he could not save is laid bare.
The 24-year-old has been trying to make sense of the calamity in his backyard since he was a child. He started to earn local acclaim for his spoken word poetry at age 12. In one breathless entry from his youth that still lingers online, he asks, “Why do people have to live in fear? Why do people have to assume that death is near?” Mustafa has evolved into a more measured writer. His new release offers a sequential narrative of grief that is as strong as it is minimal. Early glimmers of hope that Mustafa can help his friends survive become confrontations with the inevitability of loss. Those confrontations become rage on “The Hearse,” where Mustafa skillfully pivots from riding out for vengeance to looking inward for consequences: “I know what’s at stake, but you made yourself special,” he sings to his adversary. “I wanna throw my life away for you.” The project descends into sadness as Mustafa settles into his grief, owning it, and naming his ultimate desire: to get back all that’s been taken.
The power of Mustafa’s confessionals isn’t limited to their words. His singing is plain but arresting, like looking out to a lush field or up to a blue sky. On When Smoke Rises, his voice is most often smooth and restrained, making the sparse moments of emotional trilling even more poignant. Take his duet with Sampha — a perfect contemporary — called “Capo,” where he transitions from a quiet rasp to a forceful falsetto over intricate piano, signaling a breaking point in the monotony of mourning that he describes moments before. The project’s backdrop is a cascade of subtle synths, delicate guitar and bass, light drums, and gorgeous keys that ebb and flow with intention. Mustafa’s collaborators here are some of the brightest in music: super producer Frank Dukes (Frank Ocean, Drake, Rihanna) is credited on every song and heartwrencher James Blake contributes to two tracks.
Mustafa’s choice to sing of hood tragedy in folk music is effective, not only because it is beautiful and stirring, but because it feels unexpected. In popular music, portrayals of the horrors of poverty and violence often come through intense raps and atop booming 808s. This, of course, is also music Mustafa responds to, as influenced by Nas and Future as he is by Leonard Cohen and Sufjan Stevens. But Mustafa’s music, like his life, is the melding of disparate experiences that aren’t so disparate in the light. There’s a fine line between being poor in your home country and poor in a new land; between life and death; between acclaim and disregard. Mustafa, like so many black artists before him, has made public his deepest despair. In doing so, he provides a unique model of the gentleness and care his community should be held with.
Bruce Springsteen was right. At the risk of simplifying the value of this impressive box set, giving away the main storyline of his new biopic, and flattening decades of mythmaking, the reality is just what Springsteen always claimed. Even when he tried the material with his closest collaborators, using some of the strongest songs he had ever written, the most powerful version of Nebraska is still the one he recorded at home in Colts Neck in January 1982. Just a lonely man in his early thirties with an acoustic guitar, a TASCAM PortaStudio, and an Echoplex, capturing solo demos for what he thought would be a full-band project. Everything that came after was an experiment.
But what an experiment it turned out to be. For those who don’t know the story, here it is in brief. After the success of his upbeat 1980 single “Hungry Heart” and a long streak of relentless touring and critical praise, Springsteen entered one of the most creatively intense chapters of his life. He began by writing the grim ballads and shadowy lullabies of Nebraska, which he then tried to recreate with the E Street Band and in solo studio sessions before ultimately choosing to release the home demos. He did no press and no tour, which left him free to keep writing, and that work became 1984’s massive commercial hit Born in the U.S.A. During that time, he tossed aside enough songs to fill multiple albums, later shared through collections like Tracks and Tracks II: The Lost Albums. He also found time to help revive the career of early rock’n’roll icon Gary U.S. Bonds, co-writing and co-producing two comeback records, contributing a Grammy-winning song to Donna Summer, and hitting the gym with enthusiasm.
It might sound like a golden moment, but for Bruce, it felt like a creative cage—the kind of brooding, restless chapter that inspires a filmmaker to cast Jeremy Allen White to play you on screen. The twist is that the most crucial moments, from the original Nebraska to the electric and explosive version of “Born in the U.S.A.,” happened quickly and naturally, before anyone could complicate the process. Unlike anything else in his official catalog, Nebraska 82: Expanded Edition offers a clear window into that moment. Within this tight collection is a sharper, more complete image of one of Springsteen’s most legendary and personal records—still the one he treasures most—along with rare insight into his creative rhythm.
The set includes a newly remastered version of the album, a disc of solo acoustic outtakes carrying the same raw emotion, the legendary Electric Nebraska sessions, and a live album and film capturing Springsteen performing the record start to finish in an empty New Jersey theater earlier this year. The live material feels reverent, with beautiful support from former Bob Dylan bandmate Larry Campbell. The remaster reveals that, despite the album’s association with the birth of lo-fi, the sound is richer and more intentional than much of what followed. Listen to the last half minute of “Atlantic City” through headphones and focus on how the acoustic guitars, mandolin, and background vocals fade away layer by layer. It’s a reminder of how much careful craft went into creating such stark beauty.
Unlike his earlier box sets for Darkness on the Edge of Town and The River, this one isn’t about showcasing how many different paths he could have taken. It’s about sharpening the vision. Where Nebraska is known for its unbroken mood, Electric Nebraska jerks between heartland laments and roaring rock songs across its eight tracks. These takes feel like rough sketches more than finished recordings—mostly Springsteen on electric guitar and vocals, Max Weinberg on drums, and Garry Tallant on bass—hinting at an album that could have been more accessible and mainstream in 1982. And yet, this raw version of “Downbound Train,” with its clanging rhythms and unsettling bridge, may be one of the strangest things he ever put to tape.
It’s easy to see why Springsteen thought these sessions didn’t work. Versions of “Open All Night” and “Johnny 99,” which on the original album burn with desperate energy, sound here like something a bar band could fall into with a casual count-in and some good-natured rockabilly riffs. On one hand, it highlights how his delivery gives shape and gravity to his songwriting. (Compare the early acoustic “Thunder Road” to its triumphant album version for proof.) On the other hand, slipping into different musical skins was a key part of his process then. He could turn something as playful as “Pink Cadillac” into a moaning, shadowy reflection of itself, as if the character had returned to earth wrecked and hollow, fixated on one thought.
For devoted fans, these shifts are what make the box set essential: witnessing how songs like “Working on a Highway” transformed from a chilling ballad called “Child Bride” into a loud, laughing, raucous number. Some of the outtakes, like the quietly devastating country song “Losin’ Kind,” have been passed around unofficially for years. But this set also reveals two entirely unheard songs: “On the Prowl” and “Gun in Every Home.” In the first, he ends with a dizzying repetition of “searching,” drenched in slapback echo that mimics the sound of a live band. In the second, he paints a nightmarish portrait of suburban life and ends with a bare, defeated admission: “I don’t know what to do.”
Within a single song, Springsteen might take the role of a killer hiding in the dark or a runaway on the move, either escaping or facing the question of whether being caught is actually a strange kind of salvation. That’s the point of sitting in the dark: you can’t see the exit. Yet sometimes he caught brief glimpses of where it all might lead. Along with the original demo tape, Springsteen sent a letter to his manager, Jon Landau. He went through each track, detailing the grim subject matter, floating arrangement ideas, and occasionally letting a sliver of optimism shine through.
He scribbled a note next to “Born in the U.S.A.,” which appears here in two early forms: a heavy acoustic blues and a full-band rocker stripped of its later synths, leaving no doubt about how the narrator feels. “Might have potential,” he wrote. That small spark of belief carried him through. He knew these songs would take work, and that truly understanding them would take time. But he also trusted that at the end of each hard-earned day, there would still be magic in the night.
