bruce springsteen Western Stars
(columbia)
“The huge canvas…” Bruce reports back from the big country.
After nearly 50 years making music and bringing it to the world, Bruce Springsteen is aware of what his fans want from him. “your audience wants to feel at home, they say, and ‘surprise me’,” he reflected during a recent UK visit. “you have to do those two things at the same time.”
Western Stars played that duality brilliantly: here were frontier landscapes and outlaw characters familiar from Nebraska or The Ghost Of Tom Joad, but dressed in orchestral finery. Springsteen hadn’t written his archetypes into songs like this before, nor permitted such glory into his voice. yet while Sundown the song sounds heavenly, its singer says the town of the same name “ain’t the kind of place you want to be on your own”. as Springsteen noted to MOJO: “Sundown is an emotional state.”
His 19th studio album took a long time to make. It was mostly written prior to 2012’s Wrecking Ball, a cache of 40 songs gradually reduced to the final 13. the lavish arrangements evolved from Springsteen attempting to surprise himself: “I’ve never written with major seventh chords.” It evokes the great la studio era, of United Western recorders or Gold Star, inhabited by melancholic auteurs Jimmy Webb and Burt Bacharach. new Jersey’s in his bones, but Bruce has always dreamed of the West: “It’s a dramatic landscape, it’s wide open. anything could happen. It’s the desolateness, the emptiness, the huge canvas.”
the subsequent Western Stars film was conceived as a performance piece but shifted in scope with the addition of ruminative links, shot at Joshua tree national Park. Springsteen expounded on the record’s themes, revealing the autobiography within these ostensibly fictional songs’ “tale of a man just standing by a roadside”. thanks to the candour of 2016’s memoir and its Broadway adaptation, it’s possible to locate the restless young Bruce in the Wayfarer, or the embittered voice of Chasin’ Wild Horses, whose great escape turned into hard labour.
In the film, Springsteen cites Western Stars’ core preoccupation: “individual freedom versus communal life”, conflicting impulses throughout Springsteen’s entire adventure, and america’s too. He regards the Western Stars odyssey as the final element of a retrospective trilogy. “the book, the play in new york, the album, they were all summing-up pieces: how did I get where I am, where did I start? the film enhances the record to a great degree, I hope, for my fans.”
He plans to spend the rest of 2019 where many of those fans have long willed him to be: in a studio with the e Street Band. “I’ve got some music for them that I’m anxious to get started with.”
It may feel like home, but as Western Stars proved, Bruce Springsteen remains a man of surprises.
Keith Cameron
“SUNDOWN IS AN EMOTIONAL STATE.” BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN