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?

I Shout and I Fly and I Cry and I Run: Searching for Freedom through Ariana Gillis’s The Maze

               

On the title track of Gillis’s third album, she offers the ribbon from her hair as Ariadne’s thread, a lifeline to find one’s way out of the darkness. In a gently pulsing and shimmering recollection of childhood fears, she stands as the stalwart friend, the one who won’t let you stay lost forever, the one you should remember in your moments of panic. It’s as eloquent a statement of the role of the artist as I’ve ever heard, in part because it is so humble and true. She’s not claiming to be a hero that can vanquish real dragons, but she may just be able to help you handle the ones that crop up in the dark corners of your brain.

                She’s certainly done so for this listener over the course of all three of her albums. If this one, co-produced by Buddy Miller, is the breakthrough it’s getting called (I'm such a fan of all three, it's hard to make that distinction), it may just be this sharp focus. Though the arrangements are gorgeous, they tend to be minimal--a gentle interplay between guitars with the occasional glimmer of steel and keys. The virtue of the production is the way it stays out of Gillis’s way and primarily serves to complement and highlight what she does with just the right words and a voice that takes those words where no one else could go.  

                The blessing and perhaps curse of being Ariana Gillis is that she’s dazzling. Her vocals spring from clinched deep altos to wide-open ethereal heights. On the menacing “Slow Motion Killer,” when she sings “feel the chill shiver up right into your skeleton,” she is (perhaps somewhat unwittingly) describing her effect on listeners. She indeed seems to know this when she repeats the cry-of-a-refrain, “I’m in your brain.” Jim Hoke’s saxophone launches into an erratic, explosive response--those listener bones contorting past control.

                What makes her more than a fascinating talent is her unrelenting desire to get at the truth in the moment. The record bounces through a dialectic. She begins with the gritty “Dirt Gets Dirty,” digging holes to escape her own prison, and she immediately follows that by reaching back for a trapped friend on “The Maze.” She confronts isolation on “The Feeling of Empty” and finds there a zen-like acceptance before contrasting it with the terminally wounded character in “Jeremy Woodstock.” The record centers around womanhood, both contemplating a (her?) mother’s age and wisdom on “Rock It Like Fantastic” and her own wholeness at the point of severing a relationship, “Less of a Woman.” (Glimpses of each cut and downloads available here--https://www.arianagillis.com/)

                The trilogy that comes next is defiant and, though hard fought, triumphant. “White Blush” is a seemingly delicate creation—at points just the drummer's sticks and stabs of guitar, eventually bolstered by banjo—about refusing the equation of vulnerability and weakness. “Slow Motion Killer” and “You Don’t Even Know My Name” take the concept of misleading appearances even further. In “Name,” she describes the impossible princess at the heart of this fairy tale as someone who “goes mad at night” and is “low in the afternoon,” but she points out this is exactly how she lures you in—“maybe you see the same things in you.” None of these dangers and flaws make these characters lesser women; they make them more fully human.

                The record ends with hauntings. “Lost with You” describes a ghost of a relationship she never wants to leave, and its gentle arpeggios and “silver tears” offer a grace to mourning that may never end. At the same time, the orphaned singer in “Dream Street,” contrasts the loss of her mother with her ongoing struggles. "I'm going to play it so hard," she sings of her "busted up guitar," and in doing so, she holds tight to that ribbon and pulls out of "The Maze's" darkness and into its light.