In 2011, Bruce Springsteen started recording the album Western Stars, only to sideline the project for an E-Street Band tour. Recording sessions eventually continued over the years, the album was completed in 2018 and the belated release this year was met with glowing reviews. But Western Stars wasn’t backed by a tour, the first time the musician skipped the road on an album since his 1982 folk acoustic landmark, Nebraska.
But Springsteen makes that right with the accompanying concert-doc “Western Stars.” Fans clamoring for those gorgeous songs will be in nirvana and regular civilians might just be blown away too by this deeply intimate experience; the doc can be that breathtaking in power. Directed by Springsteen himself alongside his longtime film collaborator Thom Zimny—who has edited or directed seemingly everything Springsteen’s done that’s had a visual component to it since 2005—the songs, ruminating poetically on life and the American Dream, are reborn in this indispensable concert film, and nearly every tune has been enhanced and given room to breathe.
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Inspired by Glenn Campbell and Jimmy Webb’s lush and grand string-driven California pop, some albums need to be presented in a special light and Springsteen makes the absolute correct choice by presenting the personal Western Stars visually. The setting for the doc is a 100-year-old barn located, in, where else, New Jersey, as Springsteen, accompanied by bass, drums, piano, guitar, background vocals, and a massive 30-piece string section, creates one of the great concert movies of this century. Sure, it really helps if you’re a fan and know the record. It doesn’t hurt that the album, a masterful blend of cowboy lore, folk yearning, and indispensably vast American landscapes, is a late-era classic that definitely deserves a special place in the Boss pantheon. Neutral viewers coming to the doc sight unseen, might be running to the nearest record or digital store afterward.
13 songs are sonorously played from beginning to end, Springsteen poetically narrating their intros as beautifully rendered cowboy imagery appears on the screen, gleaming through landscapes, driving cars zoom by and the artist placing himself in apropos situations for each tune.
The album’s final song, “Moonlight Motel”— intro’ed via joyous stock footage of Springsteen and wife Patti Scialfa’s Yosemite ranch honeymoon back in the early ‘90s— is overflowing with lyrically humane emotions. “Stones,” a dreamy biblically-influenced song, has Springsteen softly being backed by Scialfa’s pitch-perfect vocals. The desperately romantic “Somewhere North of Nashville” Springsteen is accompanied just by his own rusty acoustic guitar that creates pure intimacy on-stage.
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Much like the epics that made him famous, there’s an aspect to these songs that renders them essentially cinematic — a washed-up Western actor even quips at some point in the title song that he was “Once shot by John Wayne, which, as his claim to fame, garnered him thousands of free drinks over the decades. The magnificent editing is credited to Zimny himself, who finds the room to make these songs visually come alive through pace, collage, and staging. There is never a wasted moment to revel in the musicality on-stage; whether it’s in Charles Giordano’s magisterial piano licks or Gunnar Olsen’s drumming, Zimny captures the songs and album with space, breadth, and depth that absorbs you into the world.
Much like the crowning jewels of the cinematic concert form (“The Last Waltz” and “Stop Making Sense,”) “Western Stars” is a celebration of music and its surrounding storytelling universe. As crafted by Zimny and Springsteen, this visual album is expansive and engrossing. Watching these songs performed instead of just heard, creates a grander context to each tune and makes the achievement of this formidable album all the more impressive. Lastly, what “Western Stars” best achieves, a universal notion that will hook fans and non-fans alike is the shared sense of community displayed in the infectious love shown for playing vital and moving music. [A-]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nGqjav-KbDU