Bruce Springsteen – Western Stars
Columbia – 14 June 2019
A new E-Street band album is in the works, but for now, Western Stars is Bruce Springsteen’s first new material in five years, produced by Ron Aniello and backed by musicians that include organist Charlie Giordano and Jon Brion on celeste and farfisa, this is solo Springsteen in folksy form with lush orchestral string arrangements, French horn, David Sancious’s tinkling piano and female harmonies from Patty Scialfa and violinist Soozie Tyrell. One that harks to the country tinged Southern California pop of the early 70s with more nods to Webb than Woody, Bacharach and Campbell in his musical saddlebags as he rides out under those twinkling skies with songs embracing “a range of American themes, of highways and desert spaces, of isolation and community and the permanence of home and hope.”
The imagery of restlessness and the road ahead is announced from the opening with the banjo-sprinkled Hitch Hikin’ (“I follow the weather and the wind”), where he’s “a rolling stone just rolling on.” The theme carries over into The Wayfarer, where, to a steady drum pulse and strings he sings of “the same sad story, love and glory, going round and round. Same old cliché , a wanderer on his way, slippin’ from town to town”, the narrator rejecting domesticity as he declares he’s not one of those to find peace on “the sweet streets of home”.
Things are on the move again in the slow rolling Tucson Train, clacking percussion preceding a signature cinematic Springsteen intro to the story of a construction worker quitting San Francisco (“Tired of the pills and the rain”) for Arizona “looking for a new life, one I wouldn’t have to explain” when “a little peace would make everything right” as he waits for his lover to join him.
While the album title might suggest the firmament, the track itself is actually a more specific reference to the old Hollywood movies, themselves an embodiment of a lost, more simple America, sung in the voice of an ageing former actor who once got shot towards the end of a John Wayne movie (“That one scene’s bought me a thousand drinks”) now just vaguely remembered “from that commercial with the credit card”, but who finds meaning as he saddles up and drives out “East to the desert where the charros, they still ride and rope” and “the western stars are shining bright again.”
Indeed, faded glories loom large. On the piano accompanied strum of Drive Fast (The Stuntman) he sings “I got two pins in my ankle and a busted collarbone/A steel rod in my leg, but it walks me home”, a familiar Springsteen song of resilience and a love (“We met on the set of this B picture that she made/She liked her guys a little greasy and ‘neath her pay grade”) that keeps you together when times get tough (“Don’t worry about tomorrow, don’t mind the scars/Just drive fast, fall hard”). From the silver screen to songwriting, on the two-minute Somewhere North of Nashville the narrator recalls how “I came into town with a pocketful of songs. I made the rounds but I didn’t last long”, the failure to make the grade just one “a list of things that I didn’t do right/With you at the top of a long page.”
Despondency and loss of an emotional anchor hang like a shroud. On the strings swelling Chasin’ Wild Horses he’s the guy with a temper who left home, friends and regrets for a cowboy’s life out on the Montana line, working “till I’m so damn tired/Way too tired to think” but unable to keep memories of a lost love “come rollin’ ‘cross my mind” as “The only thing up here I’ve found/Is tryin’ to get you off mind/Is like chasin’ wild horses.” On the similarly orchestral Stones he wearily confesses “I woke up this morning with stones in my mouth/You said those were only the lies you’ve told me” while the Orbisonesque There Goes My Miracle has him watching his love and hope walking away.
Bars are always a place of refuge to drown sorrows in the company of other hurting hearts, such as Sleepy Joe’s Café, “a place out on the highway ‘cross the San Bernardino line/Where the truckers and the bikers gather every night at the same time/At seven the band comes in and locals dance the night away”, where “Monday morning’s a million miles away”, farfisa and accordion lifting the spirits. But such places are rare and on a Springsteen album you’re more likely to find yourself propping up the bar in Sundown, not “ the kind of place you want to be on your own/It’s all long, hot, endless days and cold nights all alone” as you drift from bar to bar, the vocals soaring as the narrator clings to the hope that clinging to the hope that “When summer’s through, you’ll come around.”
For a brief moment the clouds part for the shuffling snares and walking drum beat of Hello Sunshine as, even for the drifter with the walking shoes who falls in love with lonely, there comes a time when “you can get a little too fond of the blues”, but the album ends on another melancholy note with the acoustic picked Moonlight Motel, “a place on a blank stretch of road where/Nobody travels and nobody goes”, for a reminiscence of two lovers seeking to escape and lost innocence with things having changed for the worse as the years pass and “bills and kids and kids and bills and the ringing of the bell” take their toll, the site of their young romance now “ boarded up and gone like an old summer song/Nothing but an empty shell.”
Sharing a similar sensibility to Nebraska and Tom Joad, it’s an album that creeps up on you and leaves your heart hurting. It’s been commented that it seems strange that Springsteen hasn’t responded to Trump’s America, but listen to this album between the lines as he laments of how “Now the pool’s filled with empty, eight-foot deep/Got dandelions growin’ up through the cracks in the concrete/Chain-link fence half-rusted away/Got a sign says ‘Children be careful how you play’”, and you’ll realise that perhaps he has.
Western Stars is out on 14 June 2019