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TBruce Springsteen's 19th album was announced as a dramatic break with tradition. So dramatic, in fact, that in the interviews that accompanied his release, the author of Western Stars felt compelled to reassure his fans that he would be recording and touring with E Street Band later this year. year. It's hard to miss the hint that "normal service will be resumed as soon as possible" about this announcement, a balm for Boss fans horrified by the distance Western Stars is taking her hero away from one of his styles classical music.
There is no mention of the E Street Band's booming sturm und drang, nor of the realism stripped of his previous solo albums: they are replaced by succulent orchestrations, heavy on the strings and French horn, cooing female choirs, shimmering guitars and quivers with tremolo effects, sad pedal steel. It was not designed in country music as a distinctive musical hybrid from Hollywood recording studios in the late 60's and early 70's, which sparked a West Coast folk-pop in Nashville and ambitious and sophisticated arrangements: Glen Campbell's adult American pop collaborations with Jimmy Webb or the covers of Everybody's Talkin 'with Harry Nilsson and I guess the Lord must be in New York.
This is clearly a departure, even if it is perfectly in line with Springsteen's approach. His sound is almost always based on a polite nostalgia. E Street Band and The Ghost of Tom Joad are both rooted in music that flourished in the United States when Springsteen was 12 or 13: the first is an amplification of American pop before the Beatles – the drama which echoes both Phil Spector and the group. Gary US Bonds and Dion and the Belmonts – this last title illustrates the folkloric revival of the early 1960s, with special reference to Bob Dylan in the young, Woody-Guthrie-flame guardian mode. A few years later, Western Stars focuses on what would have dominated the traditional tastes in the late teens of Springsteen: at a time when it would have been hard to dig Jefferson Airplane, but what aspiring young artist might not not have your head turned by such consummate examples of the composer's art?
Certainly, there is a real and quite touching love in the way Springsteen channels sound on Western Stars. There are moments of transcendent beauty – including Drive Fast's shuddering instrumental coda – but he is also not afraid of his occasional tendency to Schmaltz. Rather the opposite. Listening there, it's my miracle or my sunset, on which he rubs the ropes from the top of the camp and turns his voice into a song, stripped of the usual grain of Springsteen, one has the feeling that He spends a fantastic day: an artist always like the apotheosis of an honest blue-collar heart full of fireworks, in the same way that he was delighted to tell the audience to his Broadway residency as Bruce Springsteen's character was a Ziggy Stardust-ish build that had never done anything. This helps the songs be strong enough to resist treatment, rarely slipping into pastiche. The only real misfire is the Sleepy Joe's Café, which feels a little rounded for its own good, without the help of such a great accordion: the E Street Band could have turned it into something more powerful and motivating.
"It's the same sad story that turns again and again," Springsteen sings in The Wayfarer and listening to the rest of the lyrics, you understand his words. If the sound of Western Stars distinguishes it from Springsteen's previous solo albums, the words will bring it closer. Like Nebraska or Tom Joad's Ghost, he offers a selection of dark stories and persistent pen-portraits. Like Nebraska and Tom Joad's ghost, it seems to be a product of his time. The group of desperate cops and criminals from the old album undermined Reagan's gung-ho triumphalism in America, while Tom Joad's illegal immigrants and drug addicts did the same for an era of record breaking records. Dow Jones index. Western Stars, meanwhile, is populated by characters who have surpassed their best level – the actor in the process of disappearing, reduced to peddle Viagra on television and tell his stories to those who buy him a drink; Drive Fast's injured stuntman remembering his youthful lightheartedness, Somewhere North's failed songwriter from Nashville and the guy who was mournfully watching the closed site of an old Moonlight Motel rendezvous – all ruminating on the Evolution of things, not only for the worse, but in no way, none is anticipated.
This adds to an album that manages to be both unexpected and one-piece with the back catalog of its author. The normal service may be resumed in due course, but Western Stars is powerful enough to make you wish Bruce Springsteen to take more stylistic detours in the future.
• Western Stars is released on June 14th.
Alexis listened to this week
Bill Callahan: What happens after certainty?
A little closer to Callahan's Shepherd in a sheepskin jacket, a song that sounds like an intimate and slightly disjointed late-night conversation.
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