By Vera Hough
Others have noted the strings.
It's the main, the most noticeable, the most substantive departure on Bruce Springsteen's new and highly anticipated album, Western Stars. You'll be listening to, say, "Chasin' Wild Horses" or "Sundown," and just as you're thinking, "Well, this is just a Bruce SpringsteenTM song," the strings come in. With them, they bring the Bacharach, the Campbell, the Webb. And they soar.
It's not that we haven't heard soaring from him before. Big Man's saxophone could soar. But that was the sound of a heart soaring into dreams of escape as its body struggled on the ground. This is more like a hawk making lazy circles in the sky.
Because it's the spaciousness, isn't it, that fascinates Easterners when they fall in love with the West? Of course it's not just one thing. If it were one thing, though, it would be the wide open space -- the size. When the soaring strings come in, something happens to the song we thought we knew, the one we thought we had heard before. As Tess Gallagher says, "Then something else happens. The song gets large."
I spent a few days on my own in Big Sur last fall, and as I drove the PCH I did my usual homespun cognitive behavioral therapy.
"What's wrong, honey?" I asked myself (I'm trying to be nicer to myself). "What are you so anxious about? We're past the part where you might drive off the cliff."
"It's the parking," my anxious self said. "When I get to the inn, where will I park?" (a perennial fear).
*Laughter* "Wherever you want! This is California, there's all kinds of room!" (Angelenos, don't @ me).
I noted the others, noting the strings, because I'm a little nervous about my qualifications to review a Bruce Springsteen album. I have some of my bona fides: the first Christmas present I ever gave my father was the Born To Run LP. I got really pissed once when I was running the Spring Lake Five and someone cut "Rosalita" off in the middle of the track to play "Eye of the Tiger" on their front-yard speakers instead. "Glory Days" makes me cry.
I'm not a completist, though -- I only own a handful of albums -- and I'm the farthest thing from an expert. I have one real qualification. Like the Springsteens, my family goes way back in Monmouth County. As my mother recently mused, "Who am I, after all these generations of people, to decide to go somewhere else?" Baked into that line is the acknowledgement that there is a real temptation to go somewhere else. We rooted New Jerseyans get what's cool about California.
I realized: I don't have to be a reviewer. I'm just a fellow traveler, a sort of very distant cousin who might just think the same way about things that Bruce Springsteen does. That's how everyone feels, of course, that's his secret. It's how people felt about Woody Guthrie, how they feel about Bob Dylan (if they could actually figure out what he thinks about anything), how they should feel about Jimmy Webb if they were paying attention. (I "discovered" Jimmy Webb singing his own stuff about ten years ago, so I feel extra-proprietary about him).
Speaking of Bob Dylan, there's some genuine poetry on this album -- especially in "Stones" and "Moonlight Motel." Squinting at my phone mid-run on my first listen to the album, I thought "Stones" was called "Stories," and it easily could be, since it's about telling lies. I predict that Bruce Springsteen wins a Nobel Prize some time in the next ten years, and I further predict that a lot of people will be real jerks about it. There are some great story songs, too, like "Drive Fast (The Stuntman)" and the title track. There are some nice freight train rhythms to the guitar that opens "The Wayfarer" and of course "Tucson Train."
Then the strings always come in. They soar, and they open our cramped eastern minds up to the space they crave: the desert, the mountains, the big sky, and the Pacific, which somehow manages always to look bigger than the Atlantic, even when you're only looking at a little piece of it.
So this is Bruce doing what he always does: taking a little piece of America and saying big things. Only this time he's drawing a bow across it: tremolo, legato and all.
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