Western Stars by Bruce Springsteen
Western Stars is the nineteenth studio album by American singer-songwriter Bruce Springsteen, released through Columbia Records on June 14, 2019. It was produced by Ron Aniello, who worked with Springsteen on his two previous albums: Wrecking Ball (2012) and High Hopes (2014). The album marks Springsteen's first new studio album of completely original material since Wrecking Ball. Springsteen said a documentary on the making of the album is being planned. However, he is not expected to do a tour for the album and announced that he will shift focus towards recording a new album with the E Street Band in the fall of 2019. Background Springsteen stated in April 2019 that the album was influenced by "Southern California pop music" of the 1970s, including artists such as Glen Campbell and Burt Bacharach. Upon announcing the album in April 2019, he called it "a return to my solo recordings featuring character-driven songs and sweeping, cinematic orchestral arrangements", with a press release characterizing it as about a "range of American themes, of highways and desert spaces, of isolation and community and the permanence of home and hope". Singles "Hello Sunshine" was released on April 26 as the lead single, along with a music video. "There Goes My Miracle" was released as the album's second single on May 17, 2019. The album's third single, "Tucson Train", was released on May 30, 2019, along with a music video directed by Thom Zimny.A music video for the album's fourth single, "Western Stars", also directed by Zimny, was released on June 14, 2019.
It's hard to imagine Bruce Springsteen describing a project of his as a concept album—too much prog baggage, too much expectation of some big, grand, overarching <i>story</i>. But nothing he's done across five decades as one of rock's most accomplished storytellers has had the singular, specific focus and locus, lyrically and musically, as this long-gestating solo effort—a lush meditation on the landscape of the western United States and the people who are drawn there, or got stuck there.<br /> Neither a bare-bones acoustic effort like <i>Nebraska</i> nor a fully tricked-out E Street Band affair, this set of 13 largely subdued character-driven songs (his first new ones since 2014's <i>High Hopes</i>, following five years immersed in memoir) is ornamented with strings and horns and slide guitar and banjo that sound both dusty and Dusty. They trade in the most familiar of American iconography—trains, hitch-hikers, motels, sunsets, diners, Hollywood and, of course, wild horses—but aren't necessarily antiquated; the clichés are jumping-off points, aiming for timelessness as much as nostalgia. The battered stuntman of “Drive Fast” could be licking, and cataloguing, his wounds in 1959 or 2019. As convulsive and pivotal as the current moment may feel, restlessness and aimlessness and disenfranchisement are evergreen, and the songs are built to feel that way. In true Springsteen fashion, the personal is elevated to the mythical.
