Bruce Springsteen's "Western Stars" album is synonymous with cinematic power



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With the release of his 19th studio album "Western Stars", Bruce Springsteen again raises the trajectory of his masterful career. A great American storyteller in the vein of Woody Guthrie and Bob Dylan, Springsteen dares to be serious in an era of deafening cynicism.

During the production of the album, Springsteen amusingly described the sound of "Western Stars" as being "Grand Canyon music". As in the gigantic and impressive immensity of the national park, "Western Stars" accentuates Springsteen's character-centered narratives with the cinematic power of orchestration goodness. But in reality, "Western Stars" has much less in common with classical music, Springsteen avoiding such ornate and plush sounds for the lush, grandiose arrangements of Southern California pop of the early 1970s.

Holding the music palettes is a wise choice for Springsteen's latest album. A musical and lyrical tour de force, "Western Stars" features one of Springsteen's most coherent and carefully mapped discs.

The cycle of the song starts – and without preamble, no less – with "Hitch Hikin '", the story of a wandering traveler realizing his dreams and curiosities on the windswept roads of the Southwest. For the narrator, it's a decidedly simpler time, a place where "The cards do not do me much, my friend / I'm the weather and the wind". At the time, "The Wayfarer" roared, the lonely realities and dangers inherent in being an uncontrolled hiker began to break the sunny optimism of Springsteen's narrator. "Same sad story, love and glory, rotating in circles / An old clichĂ©, a wanderer who walks, slips from town to town."

The "Western Stars" advance continues unabated with "Tucson Train", the moment the Springsteen traveler gives way to the stresses and anxieties of an unhappy love affair. But with the title song and "Sleepy Joe's Café", the narrator finds his juvenile fantasy, if only for a brief moment, under the great sky of the south-west, where he dances all night in a bar along the folk road.

"Drive Fast (The Stuntman)" starts spinning the disc. "I have two pins in my ankle and a torn clavicle," says the singer, and "a steel rod in the leg, but it works me at home. In many ways, the stuntman exists as a sort of stock character in the lexicon of 1970s Hollywood tales, an aspect Springsteen brings home with the chorus: "Drive fast, drive hard.

By "Chasin's Wild Horses," Springsteen's narrator begins to succumb to the darkness that was almost invisible during the horrors of "Hitch Hikin". The lush orchestration of the album giving way to a mood of county and western ambience, the singer shatters. on himself, to be delivered to an emotional crossroads.

Bursting with regret and overwhelmed with bad mood, the Springsteen narrator literally touches the bottom with "Stones". While listeners have already compared "Western Stars" to the sounds of 1970s classics such as Glen Campbell, Gordon Lightfoot and Harry Nilsson, "Stones" evokes the bold orchestral power of Aaron Copland. The plaintive brass introduction to the song forms a proper background for the narrator's heartbreaking understanding that his romantic life has become sifted with lies and the betrayal of his lover's easy duplicity. With the advent of "There Goes My Miracle," the narrator can only lament the terrible measure of his loneliness and loss. In doing so, Springsteen is preparing two of his best closing numbers in the stories "Hello Sunshine" and "Moonlight Motel", which communicate the gravity of the invasion of adulthood as effectively as any one. what a composition of his incredible book of songs.

In "Hello Sunshine," Springsteen's narrator begins to struggle with the reality of his broken self, a lost, self-admitted soul who has "a soft spot for rain" and is inclined to "love the blues a little too much" . While it may be finally big enough to let the sun pierce the isolated clouds of its damaged psyche, "Moonlight Motel" reminds us that there are other markets difficult to face. beyond the horizon. A sweet paean for the inevitable obligations that come with maturity and this simple act of aging, "Moonlight Motel" finds Springsteen's narrator bidding farewell to the romance of his youth. Now all that remains is "children, bills, bills, and children," he laments, becoming an "empty shell" of his old self.

One of the best Springsteen outpourings in the dark that threatens to destroy ourselves, "Moonlight Motel" finds the narrator running out of words, singing "That's better to have loved, or better, have loved. " and exhausted at the dusty bar of the closed motel, he can not even muster the energy necessary to admit the fatal magnitude of his loss.

Co-produced by Springsteen and Ron Aniello, "Western Stars" offers a powerful and sobering story about life in the United States. At the end of the disc, he manages to make the connection between the wide-ranging optimism of his early days and the universal experience of his American characters. Featuring a number of musicians – including Patti Scialfa, Jon Brion, David Sancious and Soozie Tyrell – the album was brilliantly mixed by Tom Elmhurst, who brings to the Springsteen scene vast perspectives of emotional power and grace. every turn.

For many listeners, "Western Stars" can rightly sound and feel like a nostalgic trip we need so much, in a simpler time and place, compared to our conflicting present. But for Springsteen, evoking an atmosphere of the 1970s is not just an act of genre experimentation, but rather a place conducive to communicating even greater truths about the highlights and sorrows of human experience.

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