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Listen to the first track of Bruce Springsteen's Western Stars, the album he released last May, and you'll hear someone boast of "hitchhiking" all day. " He accepts the journey of a man and his pregnant wife; then he takes a lift from someone else, just a free guy to answer the call of the highway. Two cuts later, on a song called "Tucson Train", we get a different story – he may be a new protagonist; Perhaps he is the same romantic adept of "Hitch Hikin" and a hundred other titles of Springsteen – who had gone astray, lost and his true love. But now that he is installed, he is ready to be part of society, he looks at this train of 5:15 bringing him with his baby. (It takes a lot to laugh, etc.)
There are 11 other melodies, some of which are ballads tinged with country and others, Seventies SoCal Symphony Pop. But you could say that the whole story is there in these two tracks. The guy who was born to run. The man who is finally ready to win and embrace human contact.
If you still do not know where he is coming from, Springsteen says it as clearly as possible at the beginning of Western Stars, The film-concert-album-concert that he and his long-time collaborator / director, Thom Zimny, premiered for the first time at the Toronto Film Festival on Thursday night. (It will be released in theaters Oct. 25.) His collection of songs about road warriors and B movie actors, stunned stuntmen and places where truckers and bikers drink together, is a look at "the two sides of the American character … individual freedom and life together. "He tells these scenic scenes that turn the cover of a mustang into a literal film, interspersed with clips of personal movies. A close-up details the hand on the wheel of a van, ready for charter. The shot is repeated about 90 minutes later, with another hand now resting tenderly on the original one. That's the trip Springsteen wants you to take here. It's the same thing, he notes, that he's been doing for 35 years.
After publishing this solo project, the songwriter knew that he was not going to support the album with a tour. Still, he wanted to do something for, in his words, "bring this music to the public." Springsteen came up with the idea of playing the entire movie from start to finish and filming the film event for posterity. He and Zimny, the filmmaker behind dozens of music videos and making-of documentations about Bruce, have begun to pinpoint locations; they finally settled on the top floor of the barn on the Springsteen property. ("We've done a lot of space," he admitted at a Q & A session after a press briefing in the afternoon.) The idea was to organize an intimate show "for some friends and to entertain the horses". Just a small crowd, an honkytonk-style bar, a ragged band dabbed by an orchestral section and a singer with a guitar.
And as a performance film, Western stars is a perfect example of why this music was to be played and heard live. On disc, you can feel Springsteen making his way through unusual styles: C & W lite to Jimmy Webb, Brian Wilson's baroque pop, crooner to Everly Brothers, musical arrangements that would not be moved on an old set Harry Nilsson (listen to this random mix that opens "Hello Sunshine" and tell me you do not expect the first line to be "Everybody speaks to me …"). Seeing him perform these songs on a stage, though, and you get the impression that he has all those qualities now – he's turned all those influences into a seamless sound of Springsteen. Some cuts open like a bottle of oxygenated wine, be it because there is a plethora of string players or a single criminal partner – the interaction between him and his wife / guitarist Patti Scialfa on "Stones" deepens the cut considerably – bringing something else out of it.
But what you see in the live versions is the sum of these parts in a coherent whole. He is a singer in tune with the music community around him, a concept as thematic as possible on the album. (Thankfully, the film's soundtrack will also come out, which means you'll get Glenn Campbell's gorgeous "Rhinestone Cowboy" cover by Springsteen & Co. – an impromptu coda who, Zimny, did not know Bruce was The fact that a cameraman is nearby and he quickly grasps that it's a stroke of luck.) These moments share time on the screen with free-form scenes of Bruce wandering alone in the California wilderness near Joshua Tree, offering commentary on both songs. and his own struggle to reconcile his stoic solitary and his loving husband and father. There are stoic poses galore, as well as old clips of young scruffy Springsteen and rare Super 8 films from his honeymoon with Scialfa that Zimny found buried in the archives.
Sometimes it creaks ("nineteen albums, and I'm again written about cars "). Sometimes it goes into philosopher mode, offering the kind of deep thoughts ("Go in the dark, because that's where the next morning is"), that long-time fans will tell you that you participate in the race when you pay the ticket. All of this seems to be part of the self-reflection phase that Springsteen has gone through in recent years; he admitted in the Q & A that the film is the last part of "a story that I have not really told before" and that includes his 2016 memoir Born to run and his 2018 residency on Broadway. Introspection suits him, especially if it's the kind of art we get from him now. He hoped the film would help people understand the subject of the songs a little better. Mission accomplished.
But Western stars It's not a therapy session. It is a portrait of the lightning bottled, like all the great concert films. It's a pleasure to watch a guy who has been practicing this for over 50 years find another way to make it cool without giving up what made it great at first. And it's also a personal look at a person who works through his music, seeking to regain a sense of peace in the spotlight and realizing, with a sigh of relief, that he really found it.
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