Jeremy Allen White Lost His Voice Performing This Bruce Springsteen Song (Exclusive)

Jeremy Allen White lost his voice after recording one of Bruce Springsteen’s iconic songs for the new movie Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere.

In this week’s issue of PEOPLE, White, 34, reveals he had limited time for vocal training before portraying Springsteen, 76, in director Scott Cooper’s new biopic. As a result, he was not fully prepared to belt out the rock star’s 1984 song “Born in the U.S.A.” when he sang the song on camera.

“My first thing was, can I perform these songs with a little bit of honesty? Can I do justice to the lyrics?” White says of his approach toward singing Springsteen’s music for the movie, which follows a young Springsteen as he records and releases his 1982 album Nebraska.

“Hopefully if there’s enough truth in this music, whether it sounds exactly like Bruce or not, people will connect with it,” White says. “We kind of got into trying to get closer to Bruce’s voice, but then there’s certain songs like ‘Born in the U.S.A.’ where there was nothing that could have prepared me.”

“He had years and years of playing in rooms like this and in s—– P.A. systems and really like testing his voice and training, and I didn’t have that,” he adds. “I didn’t have that time, so I needed to shout and that took me out. I remember recording ‘Born in the U.S.A.’ and losing my voice for a couple days.”

Though “Born in the U.S.A.” does not appear on Springsteen’s Nebraska album, the musician famously wrote and recorded a demo for the song while he completed the rest of the album’s material at home and on an acoustic guitar. Springsteen recorded the song with the E Street Band for the first time in 1982, though he elected to release Nebraska — a folksy, stripped-back album comprised of acoustic songs — before “Born in the U.S.A.”

As Deliver Me From Nowhere depicts, Springsteen found critical acclaim and success with Nebraska, paving the way for global stardom when he did eventually release “Born in the U.S.A.” and its album of the same title in 1984.

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White was tasked with learning to play guitar and sing like Springsteen in a period of just seven months. He tells PEOPLE he had “never really held a guitar” prior to taking the part.

“I felt like I was like an alien,” White says, with a laugh, of his first guitar lesson. “I didn’t understand where my fingers [go], how my fingers were supposed to behave. It was a very humbling start. I thought, ‘There’s no way in seven months I’m gonna be able to figure this out. But like anything, it was a lot of repetition.”

Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere is in theaters Oct. 24.