Springsteen lays bare his soul in ‘Western Stars’ doc
NEW YORK — Go West, Bruce Springsteen. A trip to the West frames the vibrant “Western Stars,” the new concert film co-directed and starring Springsteen and in theaters Friday. Springsteen believes the film is among his best work, alongside his “Born to Run” memoir and “Springsteen on Broadway.”
“I think probably coming up on 70 had something to do with it and just being at a certain point in your life and your work life where you felt prepared to sort of summarize the trip you’ve been on for quite a while.”
“Western Stars” shows Springsteen performing with a band and orchestra playing songs from his latest album, “Western Stars,” with filmed spoken interludes by Springsteen.
The Boss knows the terrain. His family left New Jersey for California when he was in his early 20s.
“My dad [Douglas Springsteen] knew absolutely nothing about California or the West except that was where he wanted to go to begin his new life. And he took my mother and my sister with him and that’s where they went, and that’s what they did,” Springsteen says. “They spent $3,000, that was all the money they had. They spent two nights in the car and a night in a motel on the way out there. They just built everything from scratch when they got there.”
California is the land of dreams and also broken promises. So it is in “Western Stars,” where the album vividly brims with scenic deserts, dusty highways and the last chance stands of wayfarers, cowboys, renegades and solitary figures on the fringes of show business.
“Those were just characters I was interested in and I felt I could write about them in a certain moment,” Springsteen says. “I’ve been involved in writing these Western stories for quite a while. If you go back to [1995’s ‘The Ghost of Tom Joad’], you have all the border songs that I wrote at the time.
“If you go to ‘Devils and Dust,’ ‘Silver Palomino,’ ‘Black Cowboys’ and ‘Matamoros Banks,’ so I’ve been writing in the geography for quite a while and this particular record allowed me to sort of draw on what are to me Western musical influences along with Western stories,” he says. “So I said, ‘What’s the modern West?’ It’s Hollywood, it’s Los Angeles.
“I went searching there for a few interesting characters to write about.”
A closer look, however, reveals that the film is one of Springsteen’s most personal works, revealing an inner turmoil that has shadowed him throughout adulthood.
“For a long time, if I loved you or if I felt a deep attachment to you, I would hurt you if I could,” says Springsteen in a vignette setting up “Tucson Train” in “Western Stars.”
In the film, Springsteen thanks his wife, Patti Scialfa, and his loved ones and friends for pulling him through the darkness. He’s had bouts of depression and has been in therapy for more than 30 years.
“It’s sort of a thing where I just started talking about it because it was such a large part of my life and at some point something you’ve been doing for 30 years and it’s had such a deep influence on you,” Springsteen says. “It’s something that comes up in conversation at some point.”
His dad’s struggles with mental illness are depicted in “Born to Run” and “Springsteen on Broadway.”
The musical performances in “Western Stars” were filmed over two days in May inside a barn on Springsteen’s property in Colts Neck, New Jersey.
Springsteen earned his co-director title, says “Western Stars” co-director Thom Zimny.
“Bruce was there with me in the cutting room, he was there discussing things on set with me. He was bringing references. We collaborated together 100 percent on this, and he was there when I was color correcting and when I was mixing,” says Zimny, a longtime Springsteen collaborator who recently won an Emmy for his directing of the Netflix version of “Springsteen on Broadway.” “Bruce was deep in the cave of the editing room, working away. I actually cut it right at a studio next to him, in an edit room set up in his kitchen area that was directly up next to his studio.”
“It was all there waiting to come out. It was in the record, it just hadn’t been verbalized,” Springsteen says. “Then we started to use them as just voiceovers, and then we needed images to accompany the voiceovers. So Thom had some found images. We had a little bit that we shot in Joshua Tree National Park with Danny Clinch. Those fit really well.
“Then we went out and spent a couple of days shooting our own footage and came back. Then I scored all of that and suddenly we had something that turned into an actual movie, turned into an actual film.”
An actual film that Springsteen considers one of his brightest stars. Western or not.