Western Stars align in new Springsteen movie
Movie of Springsteen’s barn concert ‘filled with the best kind of ghosts and spirits’ For a long time, if I loved you and if I felt a deep attachment to you, I would hurt you if I could.
A new album from Springsteen effectively bookends what has been a cinematic summer of Bruce. August saw the release of the Sundance charmer Blinded By the Light, in which a young man growing up in late-’80s England connects to the music of the Boss. Now comes Western Stars, in which the singer-songwriter, who just turned 70, proves he still has something to say.
The film version is co-directed by Springsteen and longtime collaborator Thom Zimny, who also worked on the Netflix recording of Springsteen on Broadway.
The format couldn’t be simpler. The performer sets up a stage in a gorgeous old hay barn on his horse farm in New Jersey. Vaulted like a cathedral, it’s “filled with the best kind of ghosts and spirits.”
Accompanied by his wife, Patti Scialfa, and backed by a 30-piece orchestra (mostly strings), he works his way through the new album’s 13 tracks.
They have a decidedly country-western twang, in keeping with such apostrophe’d titles as Hitch Hikin’ and Chasin’ Wild Horses, though he refers to one song, There Goes My Miracle, as a “Southern California pop symphony.” It works with the interstitial visuals, which include wide-open spaces, horses on the gallop and a lot of grainy old home movies from the singer’s past.
Springsteen offers a brief introduction to each track.
“This is my 19th album and I’m still writing about cars,” he jokes at one point, adding: “The people in them, anyway.” Other musings are more personal: “For a long time, if I loved you and if I felt a deep attachment to you, I would hurt you if I could,” he says before launching into Tucson Train. But the comments are seldom more than a sentence or two. They’re philosophical nuggets, not an autobiography. (He wrote that in 2016.)
They’re still beautiful to listen to, especially with a cinema’s sound system and those backing strings.
Springsteen proves both visually and aurally generous — the camera often roams over the rows of violinists and cellists, while their performance rises with a crescendo between verses.
You can already listen to the album Western Stars (in fact I’m doing so as I write this review) but Western Stars: Songs from the Film gets a release when the movie opens, and features those powerful live performances, as well as Springsteen’s encore of
the Glen Campbell hit Rhinestone Cowboy.
If there’s one downside to the cinematic experience of watching and hearing Springsteen play, it’s the odd silence that envelops the theatre as each song ends. The small crowd in the barn applauds, and at a recent preview screening I could almost feel the viewers yearning to do the same.
One fan in the row behind me spoke for many of us. As one song faded out, he whispered a single syllable in awe: “Wow.”