Movie stars and American heroes, the ones that lie ahead and the last that appear at night: Bruce Springsteen's Western Stars

As a Hollywood cowboy (archetype, bit player, singer and stunt man), Bruce Springsteen—the rock and roll animal who happens to play syllables as well as he handles guitar, piano and voice*—has once again escaped the corrals of musical genre, this time seeming to leave behind the rhythm and blues so crucial to his vision. "Seeming" is an important word here since I don't think any of this music could exist without that context, stance and relationship to the greater culture. As a record that both celebrates its role in all sorts of traditions and experiments its way forward, "Western Stars" says as much about the jazz impulse at the heart of Springsteen's musical identity as anything he's ever done, pointing back at those earliest jazz-flavored records without sounding like them (or anything like jazz, for that matter). The fact that it works at all says something about possibility.

Sometimes it seems this music and these choices ask every question about art itself. The opener, “Hitch-hiker,” features a character straight out of a Woody Guthrie song, though the details could have taken place yesterday. The music’s sweeping-plains strings lace Aaron Copeland with Richard Rodgers.

Lyrically, it’s the tale of a free spirit utterly dependent on his environment. It’s the story of the songwriter who steals a story from a family, a truck driver and a street racer, all getting him a little further up the road. It’s the story of artist and audience dependent on each other to get from one moment of grace to another—the gentle wind in the strings rings out like the “telephone poles and trees” that “go whizzing by.”

“Western Stars” is not unique as a Springsteen album about the tension between individualism and community. It is not unique for being an album that deals with consequences. It is not unique for its focus on tragic limits, and it’s not unique for its transcendence of those limits with magical leaps in perspective (in that sense “My Beautiful Reward” anticipates “Stones” just as "Stones" pulls that reward further out of reach).

What is unique here is part of what Springsteen has always been about. At a time when tradition seems to have been folded into flavor profiles on the menu of complete corporate control, Springsteen has made a record that really doesn’t suggest a home on any known format….maybe Sirius’s 60s on 6, but without the nostalgic hooks those records inherently radiate.

That said, much of this record sounds like exactly where I live 41 years after “Darkness on the Edge of Town.” Songs like “Sundown” and “Stones,” respectively, talk about being alone in a community far from the ones you love and, also, finding what community you have built has been cursed by your own failures, often weaknesses you can't quite separate from the strengths that gave you that community.

So, let’s not call this a review, maybe a testimonial.

By trading in a “rootsy,” even purist (though he's never been a good purist) approach to rock and soul for the sweetening sounds of California pop, Springsteen has suggested endless new pathways forward and perhaps never before sounded so close to the spirit and vision of his hero Roy Orbison. There's also some of Prince's fearlessness here (think about it with "Wayfarer" if nothing else). They’ve all carved careers out of the alienation that binds us together, especially in that sense we don’t quite fit and if we do it’s only for fleeting moments. Prince created new worlds, from Uptown to Paisley Park, where such inclusion might develop; as an everyday counterpoint, Springsteen reaches back to the Coasters for a GI Bill investment that seeded "Sleepy Joe's Cafe."

One thing that’s been fascinating this time around is hearing the immediate audience commentary on satellite radio and online, in part because it has been so often positively thoughtful and analytical. In this process, two songs that I felt harmonically stir my bones (“Sundown” and “There Goes My Miracle”), I’ve heard placed in completely different contexts—contemplating our elders and end-of-life issues and contemplating the pain of watching our children grow up to go their own way. 

I can hear those things in the lyrics and music (and it's sometimes devastating to do so), but I hear them overlaying my own sense of isolation in the midst of change, whatever the cause. When music’s doing its job, all these interpretations hit that sympathetic resonance wherein no answer is really wrong; they all speak to a larger perspective always unraveling with each new moment. 

When I was 30, I had something like a visionary experience listening to “Darkness on the Edge of Town” on the road dealing with an untimely death—I heard what it meant to me at 15 and 20 and 25 and then the whole as different stages in an elemental struggle. I remember wondering if it offered a way out or simply a description of my trap. I knew it offered a way to get through, but that’s different.

“You can get a little too fond of the blues,” Springsteen sings on “Hello Sunshine.” “You walk too far, you walk away,” he follows, and there’s a way this embrace of so many pieces left behind by the pop music tide feels like an attempt to walk back that journey and try to connect across entirely new musical lines. A few years ago, I remember a revolutionary hero of mine saying, “You know, when this revolution really kicks off, it’s not going to be one kind of music at the center of that struggle.” This album agrees, arguing there need be no boundaries, at least not in terms of artistic aim that’s true.

This music is so big and cinematic because it is both naturalistic (maintaining a vision of the characters against the backdrop of an indifferent universe) and (in dialectic) magically realistic. When the singer finds himself alone in his bed at the end of the record, the wind has kicked his covers off. The mantra “it is better to have loved” plays in his head. At the end of a musical journey that ties together “Wild Billy’s Circus Story” with “Jungleland,” “My Father’s House,” “Outlaw Pete” and “We Are Alive,” the singer pays tribute to a place where one could once get lost for a romantic eternity. Those days are gone, but the music never ceases to look for new ways to conjure such infinite seconds, finding inspiration even in the solemn contemplation of “dandelions growing up through the cracks in the concrete.” 

*The difference in syllables and voice? Beats versus colors?