Western Stars arrives following the explicit autobiography and starkly staged sincerity ofSpringsteen on Broadway,even though it was in the works before those performances. Instead of trying to extend that revealing tour de force,the new album veers elsewhere;it's an experiment in genre and narratives. Most (and perhaps all) of the songs are other people's stories,not Springsteen's own. In them,the West — California along with Arizona and Montana — can be a promise of open spaces and second chances. But more often,the western horizon is the end of the line,where Springsteen's characters find themselves alone with their regrets.
The music itself is a kind of character study. It harks back to an early 1970s pop style that Springsteen — now 69,whose debut album appeared in 1973 — had nothing to do with at the time.Western Stars revisits a sound that found a place in Los Angeles studios — particularly in Laurel Canyon in the late 1960s and early 1970s — and in Nashville,Tennessee,as a means to get country singers onto pop radio by making country music"countrypolitan."
The era's elaborate productions — the sound of performers like Glen Campbell,Harry Nilsson,Charlie Rich and the Mamas and the Papas — enfolded pristinely recorded acoustic guitars and keyboards,understated drums and mere whispers of country-style pedal steel guitar into lofty orchestral arrangements. At the time,it could turn corny and overwrought. In 2019,however,the style is a direct repudiation of current pop:smooth and liquid rather than rhythmic and sparse,and relying largely on acoustic,physical instruments (though on Springsteen's album,a few synthesizers slip in).
Those early 1970s productions were unapologetically decorous,premeditated,luxurious and grown-up. Yet often,in songs like Skeeter Davis'The End of the World or Campbell'sBy the Time I Get to Phoenix,the plush orchestral pop hits of the 1960s and 1970s cushioned sorrow and solitude. They were worlds away from the turbocharged bar band that would become Springsteen's E Street Band,and they were clearly aiming for the middle of the road,not the fast lane. The craftsmanship in those studio efforts was as self-effacing as it was substantial;the hired musicians were intended to serve the song,not to be noticed. As a lifelong student of American popular music,Springsteen clearly noticed.
OnWestern Stars,a few songs —Tucson Train,Sundown,Stones — sound like the E Street Band could be swapped in for the orchestra. But Springsteen strives to meet his chosen idiom more than halfway. He wrote songs that thrive on the swells and undulations of orchestral drama,and he sings with long-breathed phrases that aren't exactly crooning — he's not built for that — but that set out to sustain more than they exhort.
One of the centerpieces ofWestern Stars isChasin'Wild Horses. Its narrator did something awful in his youth,then left home to lose himself as a cowboy,chasing wild horses in Montana for the Bureau of Land Management,sometimes shouting a lost love's name to an empty echo. Its guitar-picking intro bears an odd,doubtless coincidental,resemblance to Lady Gaga-Bradley Cooper hitShallow,but its gathering impact comes from its expansive arrangement,which opens and deepens around his voice like an endless prairie.
The arc of the album — Springsteen still treats an album as a whole — moves from hope to desperation to elegy. The album begins withHitch Hikin',whose footloose narrator easily gets ride after ride (including one from a"gear head in a souped-up'72,"to pin down the era). Next isWayfarer,proclaiming chronic wanderlust as strings,horns,glockenspiel,women's voices and even castanets arrive to cheer him onward.