Reviewed by Ian Phillips.
By Bruce Springsteen, Sony Music Australia 2019.
Western Stars is the first new studio album from the boss in five years and it’s quite a departure in style from his previous work.
There’s no hint of the rock drive of the E-Street Band and only fleeting glimpses of his sparse solo album style.
Instead we get lashings of luscious strings and cooing female backing singers, mournful pedal-steel guitars and other guitars layered with shimmering effects and shmaltzy organs on Sleepy Joe’s Café.
We still have that fantastic Springsteen voice although even then he experiments with different vocal techniques.
Even crooning on songs like There Goes My Miracle.
We also still have the fantastic storytelling that always characterises Bruce Springsteen’s songs.
Western Stars is populated by a cast of characters who are well past their best, looking at the America around them and wondering where it all went wrong.
Everything has changed, not just for the worst but in ways they couldn’t have anticipated.
Characters like the title track’s fading actor who is relegated to doing Viagra adds on TV and Drive Fast’s injured stuntman who, despite being held together by pins, will try anything to capture some of his past glories, or the failed songwriter of Somewhere North of Nashville or the chap glumly surveying the site of a boarded-up motel where he once had a romantic encounter in Moonlight Hotel – they’re all somehow lost and Chasing Wild Horses.
As with a lot of Springsteen’s material, he has a preoccupation with the downtrodden and their attempts at gaining a foothold on the ladder to success.
Of course, the odds are overwhelmingly stacked against them and this angers Springsteen.
I’ve always felt that there are similarities in Springsteen’s work to that of another great chronicler of the failure of The American Dream, John Steinbeck.
Both writers have a strong social consciousness and both felt compelled to speak for those who are never heard.
I really like this album and its musical change in direction.
Then again the boss can do whatever he likes and his fans will follow.
