Home on the range - Bruce Springsteen's Western Stars

The Boss has been in a reflective mood of late. Since his last studio album, five years ago, he’s released his excellent autobiography, Born To Run, and ran his one-man stage show Springsteen On Broadway for the better part of 14 months (despite it being only meant to last for a single month), in both, drawing on his blue collar childhood in Freehold, New Jersey, the thunderclap moments of seeing Elvis and, later, The Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show, and his becoming America's most earnest rock star, journeying from Asbury Park pubs to the world's biggest stadia.

Looked at from some angles, Springsteen has always been something of a caricature: the denim, the absence of some of the personality accoutrements of other rock stars, the relentless earnestness and singular attachment to his working class roots but also the musical roots of America, be it folk, country, blues, rockabilly, rock and roll, even straight up pop. It's a guise as distinct as any of the costumes that Bowie adopted, but with The Dame they were always theatrical masks. With The Boss, the blue collar look, the worker boots and workshirts have been a uniform. He has, himself, confessed to some fraudulence, that when he was writing about cars, of riding through "mansions of glory in suicide machines" and being "sprung from cages out on Highway 9" he didn't even own a driving licence. Others have circled his stylistic orbit, be it the late Tom Petty or Gary US Bonds, as well as his associates and band members, like Stevie van Zandt or Southside Johnny & The Asbury Jukes. Only Bruce has been and remains as distinct a brand, an American brand, if you will, as Levi Strauss, Budweiser or Cadillac.

As he approaches his 70th birthday this September, the nostalgic glances over the shoulder have become more profound, but it’s hard to tell whether Western Stars, his 19th studio album and the first collection of new material since 2014’s High Hopes, casts a winsome gaze over the cowboy culture of Roy Rogers and the early 1950s television the young Bruce Frederick Joseph Springsteen may have been exposed to in that South Street, Freehold, house, or something else. Because, obviously, over the last five years, the America Springsteen has, in one way, shape or another, eulogised throughout his career, has undergone it’s most dramatic, some might even say disturbing schism in several generations.

Not that Western Stars wavers far from the classic Springsteen narrative. Laid over a painted backdrop of gentle, Bachach strings with infusions of brass and melodies redolent of Glen Campbell, it is a glorious continuation of his American romanticisation, choosing the nation’s western reaches as, perhaps, a symbol of the hope and ambition it once presented when the early pioneers and their wagon trains headed out that way. The irony of this, of course, is that one never got the impression from his book that Springsteen enjoyed his time living in Los Angeles, moving himself and his family there at the start of the 1990s, only to move back to New Jersey at the end of that decade. “I didn’t do a lot of work,” he once told Rolling Stone of his time living in California. “Some people would say I didn’t do my best work.” Poignantly, significantly, he was back living in eastern New Jersey when 9/11 happened, giving Springsteen a sickening view of his America being attacked in Lower Manhattan that Tuesday morning from beyond the Jersey Shore and Sandy Hook Bay. It resulted in The Rising, arguably his best work for a long time.

Picture: Bruce Springsteen

Western Stars can, rightfully, fit into that same bracket. It’s as satisfying a Bruce Springsteen record as he’s committed to tape, a lavish comfort meal, if you will, at a time when there’s so much about the United States that we need comforting about. It contextualises life in the deserts and vast scrublands west of the Mississippi for the challenges they present now, and would have done so for those wagon trains on their quest for the promised land. Some of this is probably more than metaphorical: Springsteen has written and spoken of his struggles with depression, and how family life has provided the perfect counter balance. Chasin’ Wild Horses, for example, may well be one such song that evokes the Wild West’s expanse while bringing it home to Colts Neck, the ranch barely six miles from Freehold where the Springsteen family is now based, and which provided the platform for his daughter Jessica to become an internationally competitive show jumping champion.

Despite this return to almost where it all began ("Born to come back," he joked in the On Broadway show. "Who'd have bought that? Nobody."), throughout Western Stars there’s a longing for freedom, still the core of most culture about the American West. Hitch Hikin’ is the folkiest of the album’s material, a song that builds from acoustic simplicity to one as sweeping as the scenic landscape the itinerant traveller heading west will encounter, telling the story through the eyes of three individuals, each with their own ambitions and dreams. Similarly, The Wayfarer recounts a wanderlust spirit that is, perhaps, as representative of Springsteen’s own displacement in his own land as that of a good yarn about the freedom of the road. There’s a similar sense of adventure in Ulysees, potentially the most personal of all the songs on this album, as it tells of an ageing traveller confronted by his dotage, reflecting on a life lived on the road and concluding that he’s not done yet. I think you can see where the author is going.