Bruce Springsteen won’t be here until next summer. But Aoife O’Donovan will cover ‘Nebraska’ in full in Philly on Sunday.

When she was growing up, Aoife O’Donovan was scared of Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska.

Not of performing the songs — which the Grammy-winning folk singer will do when she gives impatient Philly Springsteen fans a much-needed dose of the Boss by playing the album in full at the Zellerbach Theatre in West Philly on Sunday — but frightened by the chilling stories of desperate, isolated Americans Springsteen tells on his 1982 narrative masterwork.

“Nebraska came out the year I was born,” says O’Donovan, whose first name is pronounced “ee-fuh.” She spoke on the phone from Orlando, Fla., where she lives with her cellist and conductor husband, Eric Jacobsen, and their daughter.

“My Dad loved Springsteen, and I would listen to Nebraska in his car and just be so terrified of some of these songs,” she says.

“‘State Trooper,’ I remember that one in particular terrified me.”

O’Donovan grew up in the Boston area in a musical family. Her father, Brian O’Donovan, who died of cancer in October, was the host of A Celtic Sojourn, a popular Boston public radio show.

“I always wanted to be a musician,” she says. “I love music. I love singing, I love the community of folk music and just how much of a party it is. Musicians would come through town and stay at our house, and it just seemed like a really fun thing to do.”

O’Donovan loved her parents’ faves, Joni Mitchell and Joan Baez, and found her own in Ani DiFranco, The Story, and Indigo Girls. After graduating from the New England Conservatory of Music in 2003, she first made her name with Crooked Still, the folk trio that released four albums, starting with Hop High in 2004.

In 2011, during a residency at the Rockwood Music Hall in New York, she decided to cover another artist’s album from start to finish.

“That’s when I thought of Nebraska,” she says of the ghostly collection whose title cut was inspired by Badlands, Terrence Malick’s 1973 movie about 1950s spree killer Charles Starkweather.

Its pivotal role in Springsteen’s career as his first pared-down solo album, after 1980′s raucous The River, is examined in Warren Zanes’ excellent book Deliver Me From Nowhere: The Making of Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska.

“I needed an album that was conceived as a solo thing, and Nebraska is just Bruce,” she says. “It seemed like something I could tackle.” But finding her own voice inside Springsteen songs was a challenge. “It was extremely difficult.”

O’Donovan has released three solo albums, most recently last year’s The Age of Apathy. Her next one is “a little bit of a concept record” and is due early next year. It’s inspired by early 20th-century suffragette Carrie Chapman Catt and includes a cover of Bob Dylan’s 1964 anti-racist song “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll.”

She’s also a member of folk supergroup I’m With Her, with Sara Watkins and Sarah Jarosz. The trio won a best American roots song Grammy in 2020 for “Call My Name.”

Along with Jarosz, she was also in the house band on public radio’s Prairie Home Companion with host Chris Thile, continuing after the show became Live From Here in 2017 until its cancellation in 2020.

In May 2020, O’Donovan returned to Nebraska with a pandemic livestream, shot in black and white by her husband. The performance was released on Bandcamp as Aoife Sings Nebraska in 2021 and came out on vinyl this year.

With her Nebraska tour that culminates in Philly, she gets to bring her Springsteen take to a live audience. “I think what we really realized during COVID was that live performance requires not just the performer, but also the audience. It’s a whole collective experience.”

O’Donovan wasn’t daunted by getting inside Springsteen’s desperate loner — and always male — protagonists.

“That wasn’t a wall for me. I think when you’re reading a book, or experiencing any art form that has to do with a character, the goal is to make that character relatable.

“I’m not a police officer who has a troubled relationship with my brother,” she says about Nebraska’s conflicted “Highway Patrolman.” “I see myself as a storyteller that’s also able to step into the skin for the five minutes that it takes to tell that story.”

In Delivery Me From Nowhere, Springsteen is quoted telling music critic Kurt Loder in 1984: “Nebraska was about that American isolation that happens to people when they’re alienated from their friends and their community and their government and their job, … and if you start to exist in some void, where the basic constraints of society are a joke, then life becomes kind of a joke. And anything can happen.”

“That quote could have been said yesterday,” O’Donovan says.

“When I’m singing a song like ‘Mansion on the Hill,’ it really points to experiences people are having in the U.S. now where there’s so much despair. Every night when I get to ‘My Father’s House,’ which is the second-to-last song, inevitably, people are crying. It’s devastating.”

At the Zellerbach, virtuoso guitarist Yasmin Williams will open and likely join in for a Nebraska song and also during an encore when O’Donovan will perform her own songs.

Playing her own material can be a relief after running Nebraska’s emotional gauntlet.

“It’s almost like doing like a one-woman show,” O’Donovan says. “When I’m finished, I’m so exhausted, because you really have to go character to character to keep the thread of the story. It’s fascinating. It’s a total journey. I’ve learned so much about songwriting and delivery and performing since I’ve been doing this work.”

Aoife O’Donovan with Yasmin Williams at Zellerbach Theatre, Annenberg Center, 3680 Walnut St., 7 p.m. Dec. 10. $59-$69, pennlivearts.org.