While Western Stars was released to significant critical acclaim in 2019, it marked a stylistic departure for the Boss and certainly isn’t a rock album by any means. If you are looking for screaming guitars, the usual glockenspiel, and pounding drums, you will not find them here. You will, however, find a compilation of sorts of his life’s work.
Recently, I was at my parent’s house, camped out in the backyard, drinking beer and smoking cigars as usual, when my brother asked me, “That’s Springsteen right? What album is it from?” The song in question was “Drive Fast (The Stuntman).” The album was 2019’s Western Stars. It turned out that he liked the song, but like many, he’d never heard of it or the album until then. Otherwise, the exchange was at least somewhat surprising because my brother isn’t exactly a huge Bruce Springsteen fan to begin with. His personal favorite has always been “Cover Me,” a rollicking, guitar driven, high-octane affair from Born in the USA which wouldn’t make the top twenty or even top fifty for most diehard aficionados (it would definitely be at least top fifty for me, for the record). In comparison, “Drive Fast (The Stuntman)” is an entirely different kind of song, slow, lyrical, character driven, not typical of my brother’s tastes, and yet it still wouldn’t make the top fifty for most (perhaps, myself excluded). It is, however, a truly excellent song, encapsulating Springsteen’s talent for complex characterization, finding the universal in the personal, and unfolding a surprising narrative through key, highly realized moments. In it, he tells the story of a man addicted to adrenaline practically from birth, graduating from climbing the highest tree as a kid to racing on some little dirt track in the middle of nowhere, where he “liked the pedal” and “didn’t mind the wall.” From the very outset, however, we know that this hasn’t worked out well for him in many ways. The opening two lines reveal, “I got two pins in my ankle and a busted collarbone, A steel rod in my leg, but it walks me home.” From the second verse, we learn that thrill-seeking in general has transformed into an actual addiction to him, “looking for anything, any kind of drug to lift me up off this ground,” adding to his struggles without overwhelming the narrative. Though Springsteen doesn’t say it directly, at some point, the boy who climbed trees must’ve made it into the movie business as a stuntman per the parenthetical title. While the speaker doesn’t describe how and when this transition occurred, he focuses on a woman he met instead, a woman we realize has informed the rest of the song:
We met on the set of this B picture that she made
She liked her guys a little greasy, ‘neath her pay grade
We headed down to Baja in the desert, we made our stand of it
Figured maybe together we could get the broken pieces to fit
For astute listeners, however, the chorus has already alluded to the relationship, where the speaker seamlessly switches from his love for speed to his love for this woman, saying:
Drive fast, fall hard
I’ll keep you in my heart
Don’t worry about tomorrow
Don’t mind the scars
Just drive fast, fall hard
Reading between the lines, we might imagine that his lover isn’t all that different from him in many ways. Rather than speed, she seeks her thrills in potentially dangerous men while he doesn’t seem to differentiate between his life as a stuntman and his love for a woman. In that sense, both are simply on life-long quests to feel something, to bear literal and figurative scars, even though the song closes where it began, “I got two pins in my ankle and a busted collarbone, A steel rod in my leg, but it walks me home” suggesting the path isn’t easy for either. Nor is “Drive Fast (The Stuntman)” the only song about movies or addiction on the album. Indeed, the title track tells the story of an aging, unknown actor whose claim to fame was being killed by John Wayne in an unnamed western. “Once I was shot by John Wayne, yeah, it was towards the end, That one scene’s bought me a thousand drinks, Set me up and I’ll tell it for you, friend.” These days, however, he wakes up just glad he has his boots after having succumbed to “that little blue pill.” Trapped in the cycle of addiction, he begs the world and those around him to “Ride me down easy, ride me down easy, friend” and imagines some kind of rebirth, when “Tonight the western stars are shining bright again” with “western stars” serving as a double entendre, meaning both the physical stars at night and the old time movie stars he used to call friends.
The speaker in “Tuscon Train” is also addicted to pills, but rather than wallowing in misery, he sought to change his life, moving from ‘Frisco to Tuscon, “looking for a new life, One I wouldn’t have to explain.” He found a job there working a construction site, believing “Hard work’ll clear your mind and body, The hard sun will burn out the pain,” but he too longs for a piece of his old world in the form of a woman. When he was an addict, they “ fought hard over nothing” and “fought till nothing remained.” Now that he’s sober, however, he believes they can take another shot at it, that he can “show her a man can change” so he waits on the 5:15 Tuscon train, believing his baby’s coming. Typical of Springsteen, it’s not altogether clear that she is or this is just wishful thinking on his part. The speaker keeps repeating “My baby’s coming in on the Tucson train,” but beyond the fact that it needs repeating several times, suggesting she’s never arrived, late in the song, he describes himself as “praying to the five-fifteen” and insists he will “wait all God’s creation” for her. “There Goes My Miracle,” meanwhile, takes a slightly different perspective on a similar theme. This time, the speaker is searching for his love, but he knows she’s already walking away and he’s not likely to catch up no matter what he does:
There goes my miracle
Walking away (walking away), walking away (walk, walking away)
There goes my miracle
Walking away (walking away), walking away (walk, walking away)
Later in the song, he repeats the phrase “Look what you’ve done,” over and over again like it was some kind of prayer, and yet it’s not clear whether it applies to her for leaving him or him for causing her to do so. More generally, the search for something different is the focus of two other songs, “Hitch Hikin’,” where the speaker observes various people who give him a ride and decides that none of those lives are for him, and “The Wayfarer,” about a man who is either blessed or cursed with wanderlust. “Some find peace here on the sweet streets, the sweet streets of home, Where kindness falls and your heart calls for a permanent place of your own.” He, however, is a “wayfarer, baby, I drift from town to town. When everyone’s asleep and the midnight bells sound, My wheels are hissin’ up the highway, spinning ‘round and ‘round.” There is, of course, reason to wonder how he became this way and whether this truly is the way he wants to be. In the second verse, the speaker alludes to starting out life with someone in a “sweet little bungalow, something two can call home. Then rain comes fallin’, the blues come calling, and youLater in the song, he repeats the phrase “Look what you’ve done,” over and over again like it was some kind of prayer, and yet it’s not clear whether it applies to her for leaving him or him for causing her to do so. More generally, the search for something different is the focus of two other songs, “Hitch Hikin’,” where the speaker observes various people who give him a ride and decides that none of those lives are for him, and “The Wayfarer,” about a man who is either blessed or cursed with wanderlust. “Some find peace here on the sweet streets, the sweet streets of home, Where kindness falls and your heart calls for a permanent place of your own.” He, however, is a “wayfarer, baby, I drift from town to town. When everyone’s asleep and the midnight bells sound, My wheels are hissin’ up the highway, spinning ‘round and ‘round.” There is, of course, reason to wonder how he became this way and whether this truly is the way he wants to be. In the second verse, the speaker alludes to starting out life with someone in a “sweet little bungalow, something two can call home. Then rain comes fallin’, the blues come calling, and you’re left with a heart of stone.” In the bridge, he asks, “Where are you now, where are you now? Where are you now?” Did a woman turn his heart to stone and as a result, is he just rationalizing about being a wayfarer?
We can’t say for sure, but in addition to wayfarers, Springsteen introduces us to a man who spends his days chasing wild horses, literally and figuratively running from himself after something he might never catch. Instead of a woman, the speaker has been trying to escape his own temper since he was a kid, having done something vague he thinks he regrets, describing the event as something he guesses he “shouldn’t have done, Guess I regret it now. Ever since I was a kid Tryin’ to keep my temper down is like Chasin’ wild horses, chasin’ wild horses, Chasin’ wild horses.” As a result, he left his family and friends without saying goodbye and took a job in rural Montana chasing wild horses for real:
In the evenings we’d hop in the pickup
Head into town for a drink
I make sure I work ‘til I’m so damn tired
Way too tired to think
Late in the song, the speaker suggests that a woman might be involved after all, dropping three vague references, one to a person that comes rollin’ across his mind like a storm, “hair flashin’ in the blue,” another to shouting a name in a canyon and receiving only an echo in reply, and the last to simply trying to get someone off their mind. Whatever the case, there appear to be so many wanderers and wayfarers on the album as a whole that Springsteen felt the need to give them all a place to gather in the form of “Sleepy Joe’s Cafe,” a refuge somewhere removed from civilization where workers gather to forget about life for a while:
There’s a place out on the highway ‘cross the San Bernardino line
Where the truckers and the bikers gather every night at the same time
At seven the band comes in and locals dance the night away
At Sleepy Joe’s Café
While Western Stars was released to significant critical acclaim, it marked a stylistic departure for Springsteen and certainly isn’t a rock album by any means. If you are looking for screaming guitars, the usual glockenspiel, and pounding drums, you will not find them here. Instead Springsteen himself described it as an ode to Burt Bacharach and other 60’s practitioners of California pop music, relying on slow building rhythms, evocative lyrics, and catchy choruses to draw listeners in rather than bowling them over with a wall of sound. If you listen closely, there are echoes of Tunnel of Love, another rhythmic album boasting classics like “Brilliant Disguise,” and much of his acoustic work over the years. In that regard, the album can also be seen as a quieter compilation and exclamation of many of the themes and characters that Springsteen has written about in the past, the drifters and castaways struggling to get by that somehow manage to say something about us all. Will Hermes, writing for Rolling Stone, claimed that several songs “straddle the classic and the cliché,” but the album’s overall music “evokes country-tinged California pop from the Sixties and Seventies, sounding like nothing [Springsteen]’s done before.” In Entertainment Weekly, Maura Johnston gave Springsteen credit for “transforming the enormous into the intimate.” The Independent’s Mark Beaumont hailed the “sumptuous, cinematic album [as] nothing short of a late-period masterpiece.” Thomas Smith of BNE said it was “majestic in its scale, but traditional in its subject matter and narratives…a wonderful thing.” Pat Carty, writing for HotPress claimed it was a “heartbreaking yet life-affirmingly beautiful record – both elegiac and warm, a trick few others, if any, could pull off” while Sam Sodomsky from Pitchfork summed it up, “Springsteen returns with elegiac and wise songwriting conjuring the golden expanse of the American West; it’s his best studio album in years.” In that sense, the album isn’t underrated, but in another, few have ever heard of it outside of diehard fans and perhaps even more surprisingly, Springsteen himself has never played these songs in concert outside a special event for a film version. Why remains a mystery, but it’s a shame whatever the case because Western Stars, in my humble opinion, represents Springsteen’s best overall songwriting in decades and it deserves to be celebrated in its own quiet fashion. It also prompts the question: What other bands have released masterpieces that remain unheralded save by a precious few?
Confessions of a Conservative Atheist 