By Genre: Americana
Favorite Songs: “Hitch Hikin’,” “Tucson Train,” “Somewhere North of Nashville,” “There Goes My Miracle,” “Moonlight Motel”
In a way that’s going to sound like posturing, but I actually couldn’t be any more earnest about, my relationship with Bruce Springsteen is, appropriately, much the same relationship I have with New Jersey. While a SoCal native, which few, if any, can guess, I’ve been to New Jersey for semi-extended periods of time at least once a year, and as many as three times, my entire life. When I was young, New Jersey was put on a pedestal for me. I was in the period of life where family members are still your best friends, a youngun filled with the promise of summer and the absence of school and homework, and I knew I’d be doted on by my grandparents and allowed to eat things such as the cheesesteak, hailing from the mythical and as-of-yet-unlearned mecca of “Philadelphia.” I literally used to be unable to sleep at night for at least a week leading up to the flight that would take me to beautiful Cherry Hill, New Jersey and the subsequent ride to Brigantine Beach, and let me ask you, dear reader, what the heck do you think is on the radio during the summer in New Jersey? Practically one thing and one thing only: Springsteen. At a time when the soundtrack to THE WIZARD OF OZ was the only thing I could reasonably point to as music, Bruce’s output was as powerful and, dare I say it, as magical as has been described throughout his career. I was too young to appreciate the lust, sorrow, and longing of his lyrics at the time, but there’s simply nothing like your first time hearing the monolithic and timeless riffs of something such as “Born to Run.” Especially in a house where classical and jazz were the go-to radio dials growing up, I always associated Bruce’s music with love, letting loose, and yes, New Jersey.
But as I grew older, I was surprised to discover something… people really hate New Jersey. The near-pastoral suburban developments, the more relaxed and laid back ambitions and affirmations of its residents, the greasy spoons, turnpikes, pork rolls, scrapple, and the love-to-hate guidos and meatheads… people actually despise these things! I can’t really pull a card of any sort of victimhood here, but after such a positive impressionable experience with the Garden State for all of elementary school, it honestly kind of hurt to be exposed to an adolescence of vitriol and scorn directed towards a place I had such an emotional connection to. And as the bafflement got more intense as I got older, I took the coward’s way out and began to play along, adopting a faux-ironic vocal appreciation for how depressing and melancholy the place that I once cried about not being able to travel to when my dad’s back problems threatened a family trip was.
In sophomore year of high school, I became firmly Online as far as music nerdom was concerned. During my peak of misguided, anti-New Jersey sentiment, I was hit with a second blow: Hearing that Bruce Springsteen sucked (that’s probably the most polite thing anything I was finding on /mu/ was saying, in any case). Hokey. Overly sentimental. Jingoist. Propaganda-oriented. I took it all in without question or recompense, and wrote off some of America’s strongest and most wholesome cultural output as entirely without worth or value, not allowing myself to remember his music fondly and finding reasons to dismiss anything new coming from him as retro-fitted and reductive (although this wasn’t helped much by realizing Rolling Stone is hopelessly out-of-touch, seeing as they’ve given all of his late-career albums impossibly high scores).
By the time senior year of college rolled around, I had changed my tune as far as New Jersey was concerned, championing it once again, albeit in a way that still highlighted its perceived faults in a tongue-in-cheek manner. And on March 21st, 2016, a day I’ll never forget during a week I may have occasionally wanted to, I rolled up to beautiful Santa Cruz, California with the editors of the publication then known as Crossfader and a few selected writers and compatriots for Spring Break. Sent on an alcohol run, in a spirit of abandon and debauchery, I turned on “Born in the USA” at full blast, the passenger and I hooting and hollering at how exaggerated, chintzy, and foghorn-like the song was. But as someone who has always believed in committing to the bit… “Born in the USA” was the song of Spring Break ‘16, ending in a non-stop, four-hour drunken listening session and scream-along that bent and altered the parameters of reality and perception. When we returned for the final weeks of school, it was all Bruce, all the time, and what started as a joke soon developed into a passionate and earnest fandom. While it may have taken the literal physical action of “hammering the turnpike,” a dance move I hope you never have the misfortune of witnessing, I had finally broken through the cynicism of my late teens and early 20s, and was more than ready to respect and maintain Springsteen’s status as an icon.
Indeed, it seems as if Bruce Springsteen has enjoyed a rather graceful glow-up in recent years at large, an act firmly in the “legacy” stage of his career, but one whose endearing drive to work has kept him constantly touring, and even placed him on Broadway. He hasn’t adopted any sense of being an Offline curmudgeon, but doesn’t share enough of himself to potentially rub someone the wrong way, doing just enough interviews to maintain relevance and vitality. His politics aren’t exactly the most complex, but he checks the boxes of being firmly and vocally anti-Trump. He shows up, clocks in, and continues to rock the house around the world, a consummate performer we’re assured is enough of a good guy that we can shut up and let the music do the talking. All of this is to say that I was intensely curious what a new album from Bruce would end up being, as times are fraught dear reader, and they don’t necessarily demand 2019 content from Springsteen. Thankfully, his latest album is just about the ideal scenario for a 69-year-old arena veteran, offering just enough fresh ideas to avoid a tired retread of past efforts but loudly confident in its self-assured sweet spots, a refreshing and, dare I say it, rather heartwarming affirmation that legends never die.
In general, WESTERN STARS offers a slightly more stripped-back Springsteen than we heard on his last proper full-length back in 2014, with only vocalist Patti Scialfa and keyboard player David Sancious popping in from the E Street Band, but not so far as the skeletal extremes of NEBRASKA (“Somewhere North of Nashville” a notable exception). Surprisingly enough, cuts from 1987’s polarizing TUNNEL OF LOVE such as “All That Heaven Will Allow,” “Cautious Man,” and “One Step Up” are the clearest progenitors for WESTERN STAR’s blend of loosely cinematic, end-of-sunset star-gazing and folky, down-home storytelling. Springsteen’s lyricism remains his strongest calling card, and in general, the more laidback and reserved touches of piano and strings here work as the perfect complement to highlight his musings. “The Wayfarer” demonstrates Springsteen’s still-deft mastery over a turn of phrase (“Some folks are inspired by sitting by the fire, slippers tucked under the bed / But when I go to sleep I can’t count sheep for the white lines in my head”), “Chasin’ Wild Horses” is as evocative in its gruff economy as the highlights of Bruce’s early career (“The winter snow whites out the plains / ‘Til it can turn me blind / The only thing up here I’ve found / Is tryin’ to get you off my mind”), and “Stones” and “There Goes My Miracle” are back-half bangers that prove Springsteen doesn’t need the help of anyone but his charisma to craft an anthemic hook (“I woke up this morning with stones in my mouth / You said those are only the lies you’ve told me” and “There goes my miracle / Walking away,” respectively).
With its creator just shy of 70, at large WESTERN STARS avoids the occasionally dreary navel-gazing that can manifest in the music of those approaching the twilight years. The Boss seems as sprightly as ever, but the album is in-line with something like the film LUCKY, preoccupied with drifting along, stopping in to say hello to an old friend, indulging in the heightened emotions of the moment as opposed to any consideration of the encroaching end-of-the-line. This can manifest in the triumphant assertion of nothing changing but the age on the excellent opener, “Hitch Hikin’” (“I’m hitch hikin’ all day long / Got what I can carry and my song / I’m a rolling stone just rolling on / Catch me now ‘cause tomorrow, I’ll be gone”), or the more somber and bittersweet rumination of a life constantly on the move on “Sundown” (“I drift from bar to bar, here in lonely town / Just wishing you were here with me, come sundown”), but both work to further prove what we knew all along: Bruce Springsteen is here to stay for as long as we’ll have him. While there does seem to be some overarching sense of regret and reflection on loves lost and mistakes made, the aforementioned “There Goes My Miracle” hiding its narrator’s rather bleak search for a companion behind its glossy exterior, “Hello Sunshine” offers a refreshing flip on a career that regularly, albeit beautifully, glorified stories of the downtrodden and jilted (“You know I always liked that empty road / No place to be and miles to go / But miles to go is miles away / Hello sunshine, won’t you stay?”), suggesting we try to enjoy what little time we have on this Earth while we still can. The title track ends up being the anomaly here, with Springsteen almost uncomfortably frank about how livin’ and lovin’ aren’t quite what they used to be (“Then I give it all up for that little blue pill / That promises to bring it all back to you again / Ride me down easy, ride me down easy, friend”), but Bruce doesn’t stay in one place over the course of WESTERN STARS long enough to get too caught up in his feelings.
Well, aside from the “Moonlight Motel,” that is. In what is, without hyperbole, among the strongest and saddest songs of his career, “Moonlight Motel” is about as heartbreaking of a trip down memory lane as can be hoped for. Telling the story of The One That Got Away via a midnight drive to the former site of a romantic rendezvous, all over a lightly-plucked, crepuscular acoustic guitar line and slight touches of slide guitar and strings, Bruce puts the melancholy on full blast, not angry or regretful, but simply preoccupied with considering the potential avenues a former flame could have blossomed down. It’s a song like this that is augmented by the age and legacy of its writer (“She was boarded up and gone like an old summer song / Nothing but an empty shell”), as while by all accounts happily married, how many moonlight motels were there along the path of his storied time on the road, with how many loves since snuffed-out? “Last night I dreamed of you, my lover / And the wind blew through the window and blew off the covers / Of my lonely bed, I woke to something you said / That it’s better to have loved, yeah, it’s better to have loved”… that is an absolute motherfucker of a line. It’s a song like this that argues for just how much of a treasure a songwriter like Bruce Springsteen is, able to paint a picture of raw, searing emotion with a collection of a few simple couplets and his trusty guitar. “I pulled a bottle of Jack out of a paper bag / Poured one for me and one for you as well / Then it was one more shot poured out onto the parking lot / Of the moonlight motel”… Jesus.
Is WESTERN STARS a perfect album? No. The hokey tonal curveball of “Sleepy Joe’s Cafe” is a significant step down in quality from what surrounds it, and some of the middle tracks, “Drive Fast (The Stuntman),” in particular, fall into what I’d point to as the “pleasant morass” of mid-aughts Springsteen, tracks that are so preoccupied with crafting an overall impression of “soaring” they simply glide faintly off into nondescript and banal enjoyment. But apart from some uniquely strong singles to be found with 2012’s WRECKING BALL, this is easily the most consistent effort Bruce has put out since WE SHALL OVERCOME: THE SEEGER SESSIONS. To release a song as commandeering and fundamentally present as “Tucson Train” on your 19th time around the merry-go-round is a feat in and of itself, and the fact Bruce is still pumping out memorable material, a new E Street Band album and tour promised in 2020, is just so holistically encouraging. Sure, I guess you can pick some bones with the fact that WESTERN STARS is, by all accounts, an entirely apolitical album, but that is to diminish its overall message. As long as there is a county line to work on, as long as there is a kid in a small town with the dream of something bigger, as long as there is a young, idealistic couple as of yet unfaced with the cruel realities of the world, as long as there is a New Jersey to be the Patron Saint of, Bruce Springsteen has an instrument to strum and a song to bellow, and if that doesn’t help you sleep a little easier at night, I don’t know what possibly could.
Not just because am from brigantine and not because l’ve seen Bruce and e street over 100 times. This is one of the best reviews and just a great all round story that l’ve ever read. Thank you