Bruce Springsteen’s most recent album of original material, his 20th studio album, was released in 2020 and in places reaches some seriously emotional heights.

“Letter To You” is about time, ageing and loss. In 2018 George Theiss, founding member of The Castiles, passed away. This left Bruce Springsteen as the only surviving member of the first band he had been a member of, this affected him quite profoundly. It prompted the writing of the first song for this album, “Last Man Standing”. That and five other songs give “Letter To You” its central story, of those young men coming together to seek rock ‘n’ roll glory, growing old together and finally having to say goodbye.

The title song sees Springsteen offering his audience a testimonial, a summary of what he’s been trying to say to us all these years (“In my letter to you, I took all my fears and doubts, In my letter to you, All the hard things I found out…And I sent it in my letter to you”), not why but what.

“Last Man Standing” is the song that kick started this whole album. Lyrically it’s a list of memories of those early days in your first band, the people you played with, the places you played, how it felt, all capped off with the realisation that all that is now in the past and gone and “I'm the last man standing now”.

“We all have our own ways of praying. I restricted mine to 3 minutes and a 45 rpm record…Life in 180 seconds or less. If you get it right, it has the power of prayer.”  –Bruce Springsteen, Letter to You (2020). “The Power Of Prayer” ain’t about going to no church, it’s an offering to the power of the 7” single, and extension of the lyric in “Bobby Jean” from Born In The USA” that told us “we learned more from a 3 minute record baby than we ever learned in school”.

“House Of A Thousand Guitars” (probably my least favourite track) I find it confusing. It’s a hymn to the church of rock ‘n’ roll, the gig, and to rock ‘n’ rolls most revered symbol, the guitar. But the whole song hangs off a classic bit of Roy Bittan piano thumping ! Guitars barely feature at all, go figure.

“Ghosts” may well be my favourite song on this record. “I hear the sound of your guitar, Coming in from the mystic far…”. It’s that joyous rush of youth and the noise you make in your first bands. Memories of standing up there with your brothers giving it all you have, allied to the feelings of other songs knowing that those days and people are gone and all that’s left are the ghosts of those times.

“I’ll See You In My Dreams” in this incarnation is a full band workout. On his current World Tour it’s the song Springsteen has finished the set with on the majority of nights including both the shows we have seen. If the central theme of “Letter To You” is ageing and loss then that is the same message he’s been trying to get across in his recent live shows. The song is the partner of “Last Man Standing”, it relates the same story of those young boys looking for rock ’n’ roll Valhalla and although Bruce now knows he’s the last of them he’s afforded them some immortality by writing about them and committing that to record. Someone said to me at a funeral recently that you only truly die when the last person talks about you, this is that statement in song “I'll see you in my dreams, yeah around the river bend, For death is not the end…”. It’s a fantastic end for this album, all swooping Hammond Organs  and twangy, Duane Eddy style guitars and the belief that “I'll see you in my dreams when all our summers have come to an end, I’ll see you in my dreams, we'll meet and live and laugh again…I’ll see you in my dreams”, we all need that, right ?

In a similar vein to “High Hopes” half of “Letter To You” is made up of songs that have been around for some time. “Janey Needs A Shooter”, “If I Was The Priest” and “Song For Orphans” all date back to the early ‘70’s. “Janey…” was originally recorded for “The Wild, The Innocent & The E Street Shuffle” and was considered for inclusion on both “Born To Run” and “The River” although it would have sounded very conspicuous on all of them. “Burnin’ Train” was first demoed in 1993, album opener “One Minute You’re Here”, which does fit this albums themes of loss well, dates to around 2004. “Rainmaker” was written around the time of “The Rising” and this recording likely comes from the “Magic” sessions, it would have fit well on either.

Fans at Springsteen shows bring banners with them in order to request songs. He usually pulls 2 or three of these up on stage (the banners not the fans) each night and plays them. “If I Was The Priest” has become quite a popular request song and he played it in Europe for the first time ever when we saw him recently in Cardiff. It’s not bad, it’s not great either, it’s an early example of the sort of song he perfected on “Jungleland”, “Incident On 57th Street” and “New York City Serenade”, the epic. romantic street songs. But this one talks of Sherrif’s, Dodge City and Cheyenne so didn’t really fit the cityscapes he was writing in the early 70’s which is maybe why it didn’t surface on record for 50 years !

There are fans out in the world that aren’t big fans of “Letter To You” citing its less than coherent theme. The theme is age and loss but of the old songs that have been included only “One Minute You’re Here” fits that. I liked the album on first hearing and hey, can’t a guy just make a record without everything being tightly thematically linked ? I said when this album was released I couldn’t wait to hear some of it live. In the two shows we’ve seen since this albums release we’ve been treated to performances of “Letter To You”, “Ghosts”, “Last Man Standing”, “If I Was The Priest” and the heartfelt acoustic run through “I’ll See You In My Dreams” neatly wrapping up the album and shows. “Letter To You” isn’t Bruce Springsteen’s best album and by a long shot it’s not his worst, it is one I really like though. 

This is where we end our dive into Bruce Springsteen’s albums (we won’t be touching the ridiculous covers album “Only The Strong Survive”, the first Bruce Springsteen album I have no interest in hearing…what were you thinking Boss ?), well almost. There’s a lot more I could have said about all of them but I wanted to keep them as concise as I possibly could so I didn’t bore you all. Alongside David Bowie and Paul Weller, Bruce Springsteen has probably had more effect on me musically than any other. Only two of those guys are still with us and making music and The Boss is the only one of them I’m still interested in…only the strong survive huh ? If any of this made any of you take a listen to Bruce Springsteen where you haven’t before then I’ve done a decent job. Thanx for indulging me these past 4weeks…

Ghosts - https://youtu.be/Lo5QNcFioZ4?si=Pg9zVDWtUkzY9qXO

The Boss had got into a habit of filming stuff to accompany what he was doing. Shortly after he released “Western Stars” he arranged to perform the whole album in a barn on his ranch and had it filmed. I say “a barn”, this ain’t no hay filled, dirt floored cow shed. It is a huge 100 year old barn on his ranch in New Jersey. It has a bar and a stage and he’s held family events there over the years.

The film for which this is the soundtrack is a documentary of Bruce and his band plus a 30 piece orchestra performing all 13 songs from the album “Western Stars”, in the same order they appear on the album, plus a cover of Glen Campbell’s “Rhinestone Cowboy”. the musical sections are interspersed with some set pieces filmed in the Joshua Tree National Park.

If you’re a Springsteen fan this is a really magical film. A peak inside The Boss’s world and an intimate explanation of the songs from one of his very best albums. The live performances (the only time he has played these songs live) give you a new view on songs that were only released just 4 months before and the cover of “Rhinestone Cowboy” puts them in context with the music that inspired the sound of “Western Stars”.

Chasing Wild Horses - https://youtu.be/3nKvR5EptEM?si=wibnTfE3A04rdWKH

Bruce Springsteen released his first album in 1973. About how many artists could you say that 46 years after their debut they released what could arguably be their best album ? 2019’s “Western Stars” is that good !

It was Bruce Springsteen’s first album of completely new, original material since “Wrecking Ball” 7 years previously, much of it written and recorded before “Wrecking Ball”. Hugely influenced by the orchestral pop coming from Southern California in the late 60’s and early 70’s, music by the likes of Glen Campbell, Jimmy Webb and Burt Bacharach. It’s a record full of characters and cinematic arrangements of songs about highways, trains, cars, horses and deserts (we’ve been here before haven’t we ?). I’ve said before that Bruce Springsteen’s music has something of the cinema about it, whether that be the widescreen technicolour of “Born To Run” or the John Ford, ’40’s style Black & White-ness of “Nebraska” and “…Tom Joad”. “Western Stars” takes the imagery of the wide-open country of America he began to incorporate on “Darkness On The Edge Of Town” and developed through to “Devils & Dust” and creates the sound of, well, it sounds like the image on its cover, it sounds like wild horses and the mountains on the horizon that you never seem to reach, like the endless skies and the freedom that beautiful looking horse possibly represents.

These are songs as scenes, small vignettes focussing on a particular person or story or feeling. We start with the writer himself with his “Thumb stuck out as I go, I’m just travelling up the road…”. Springsteen hitch-hiked a lot as young man he has told us and here are some of the characters he encountered on his travels. Each time he jumps into a new ride the arrangement builds, from voice, guitar and banjo at the start, growing to a hypnotic orchestral accompaniment, something added each time a new ride is hitched and a new person met, until the fade. We’ve begun our journey, let’s see who we find along the way.

“Western Stars” takes us out of the cities into “America” and introduces us to a host of characters that inhabit that huge landscape. It’s conceivable that “The Wayfarer” is the same character as our hitch-hiker, but where I see the hitch-hiker as someone using that as a form of public transport he needs to travel between two spots day to day (Springsteen has said that he “hitchhiked the twenty miles from Freehold to Manasquan and back almost every day” in the mid 60’s), “The Wayfarer” is much more widely travelled, moving between different towns, looking for something. It would seem that he once had it (“You start out slow in a sweet little bungalow, Something two can call home”) and somehow lost it (“Then rain comes fallin’, The blues come calling, and you're left with a heart of stone”) and now he’s looking for whatever “it” is (“Where are you now”). 

Then we shift our mode of transport from the road to the railway. “Tucson Train” puts us in Arizona with a guy who started out like “The Wayfarer” but, after running, has realised what matters, he’s made the effort to change and now “my baby's coming in on the Tucson train”, what was lost is returning to him. Like “The Wayfarer” the Blues came calling but he’s worked to make things better. 

“Western Stars” (the song), and I’m sorry to labour the point but, this is a movie in 4 and a half minutes. If you want to imagine what this song sounds like then take a look at the cover image and animate it. Springsteen has had a fascination with “the west” for a long time and we’ve alluded to it in places. From his Mom reading him “Brave Cowboy Bill” as a kid to songs as far back as the “Promised Land” and “Badlands” and onto the themes and sounds of “Nebraska”, “The Ghost Of Tom Joad”, “Devils & Dust” and "Outlaw Pete". All that coalesces on “Western Stars” (the album) and particularly in “Western Stars” (the song). Lines like “Here's to the cowboys, and the riders in the whirlwind” and “Tonight the riders on Sunset are smothered in the Santa Ana winds” describe the scene beautifully, but…these scenes are just that, pieces of a movie. Our storyteller is an actor. He tells us he’s getting older; he’s on set where the make up girl brings him a “pick-me-up”;  a girl at the bar thinks she remembers him “from that commercial with the credit card”; he tells us he was once shot by John Wayne and that scene has bought him a lot of drinks, he’s that “famous”. It’s a song about the stars in the West and the stars in the Westerns, it’s a song about ageing (“Hell, these days there ain't no more, now there's just again”) and time passed, a theme that is becoming more important in Springsteen’s songs.

We’ll skip over “Sleepy Joe’s Cafe”…I don’t like it, let’s leave it at that. Once we’re past that we meet another character in “Drive Fast (The Stuntman)”. He could be the guy from “Western Stars” (the song), more likely the stuntman he worked alongside. He tells us about his injuries (“I got two pins in my ankle and a busted collarbone”), how since he was a kid he didn’t feel the fear (“I was looking for anything, any kind of drug to lift me up off this ground”), he uses the danger like a drug to make him feel alive. But then he meets her, on set and they “Figured maybe together we could get the broken pieces to fit”. They both have their problems but ones can help soothe the others…maybe.

Those last 3 songs (“The Wayfarer”, “Western Stars” and “Drive Fast (The Stuntman)”) sit in a sumptuous musical setting, if that’s a word you can use to describe music. They have sweeping, floating (like the clouds on the cover) orchestral strings with horns and the occasional twangy Duane Eddy guitar. Three beautiful, beautiful songs.

The second half of “Western Stars” begins with “Chasin’ Wild Horses”. It’s a song of regret, of trying to banish your mistakes from memory. Lap steels moan in the background before being joined by a picked Banjo before the music swells again as the strings join in. It’s a gentle but vast arrangement that segues seamlessly in to next song “Sundown” which picks up the pace a little. It perfectly mirrors the sound of Glen Campbell’s “Wichita Lineman”, he even sings about the “county line”, paraphrasing the “line man for the county”. We’re still dealing with with loss and regret but this may be the best pop tune on the album.

“Somewhere North Of Nashville” is the shortest song Springsteen has ever released on a studio album, clocking in at just 1 minute 52 seconds. “I wrote this song quickly at the kitchen table one morning…It’s just about being lost on the highway of life. Lost is something I’m good at writing about” he explained.

When I first heard “Stones” I was bowled over. It’s about lies and the damage they can do to a relationship, any relationship. As he says in the filmed intro to the song, “Faith, hope, trust…all those things that are hard to come by. That’s what grows your garden of love”. But lies will grow in that garden like weeds and once they take over all that’s left are stones. Musically it incorporates all the elements we’ve met so far but lyrically, in this laid back, placid arrangement it’s brutal “The dirt-brown winter field, a thousand black crows cover the ground, You say those are only the lies you've told me”. It’s an absolute standout on this album and is right up there with Bruce’s very best songs.

“There Goes My Miracle” and “Hello Sunshine” introduce some melodic (sunshine) pop levity after “Stones” weightier themes. Both were issued as (the first two) singles from “Western Stars” and serve that purpose well, introducing the sound of this album and being commercial enough to catch the ear of casual listeners. “There Goes My Miracle” sees a man being left behind, unusually for this record where many songs feature characters looking back. “Hello Sunshine” is literally the sun breaking through after a storm. Following an albums worth of looking back, mistakes, lies, regret we get a song that opens on “Had enough of heartbreak and pain” and that followed by “Hello sunshine, won't you stay” and finally the sound of Bruce Sprinsteen humming, yes HUMMING an entire verse. We all do it, you’re wrapped up in something else but you’re content and then you find yourself humming a tune, things are OK. I hope, after his years of struggle with his own being, that’s what this songs represents for The Boss.

Finally “Moonlight Motel” is a farewell to times passed, to a lover, to a family lost, whether because of the stones we heard about earlier or, well you decide…”I pulled a bottle of Jack out of a paper bag, Poured one for me and one for you as well, Then it was one more shot poured out onto the parking lot, To the Moonlight Motel”.

Springsteen has described “Western Stars” as a “jewel box of a record”. If by that he meant to convey that it is filled with gems then he described it himself better than I ever could. I haven’t done too many track-by-track dissections of albums while I’ve been writing these pieces but I thought “Western Stars” deserved that. It sounds like nothing else in Springsteen’s catalogue, all of these songs have only ever been played live once, as you’ll soon find out, and in the 5 years since its release he’s never felt tempted to perform any of them with the E Street Band.

“Western Stars” may very well be Bruce Springsteen’s best album. Do I really think that ? Well I own two copies of it (it feeds my coloured vinyl addiction, two different shades of blue (sky and navy) splatter vinyl). Do I think it’s his best ? Sometimes…

Stones - https://youtu.be/0u2WuD_321E?si=FCebH1tRDl-azzq8