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Painted Deserts

Yes, this is supposed to be a film blog, but Bruce Springsteen is one of our most cinematic songwriters, and his new album Western Stars is drenched in the iconography of westerns old and new. It also reminds us that if you ride far enough west you end up in Hollywood; forgotten b-list actors and limping stuntmen make up some of the characters in this collection of stories put to music.


Listening to a Springsteen album from beginning to end is like watching a movie full of separate stories intertwined around a central theme or location, like Short Cuts or American Graffiti. Even if they are now streamed rather than spun his songs always sound best in the context of an LP: his aesthetic sense was forged in vinyl. His work retains the sense of structure and thematic unity that was a hallmark of the great albums in the glory days of FM rock.

Springsteen has always been fond of western imagery, but this time around instead of the monochrome noir of Nebraska or the Depression era sepia of We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions the vast deserts and run down motels are painted in the sun washed technicolor of the 70s. This is the land of Hearts of the West and Peter Bogdanovich's Nickelodeon, ranchhands and drifters mingling with movie crews in towns that may only be backlot facades. The real cowboys do their work in helicopters, "Chasin' Wild Horses" while actors ride in the saddle and score drinks in saloons because they were once "shot by John Wayne". The contrast between the brutal realities of the western lifestyle and the dreams of western cinema provides a backdrop for stories of men running out of time and running out of lies to tell themselves.

Springsteen wrote in his memoir Born to Run that he was from a boardwalk town where everything was "tinged with fraud"...including himself. The truth is that he is not so much a "fraud" as a performance artist; in his early years he rapidly morphed from psychedelic jammer to urban folkie to beachtown hipster to greasy rebel hotrodder to pompadoured rockabilly throwback to blue collar veteran; his songs, his wardrobe, even his vocal inflections in interviews and on stage patter changing to suit the current album.

The truth was that he had spent about as much time in factories as David Bowie had spent on Mars; but that didn't make either of them any less convincing in their roles. Henry James once wrote a story called "The Real Thing" about an artist who discovers that his lowly born professional models do a better job of looking like aristocrats than the real blue bloods he tries to paint.

Even now the wealthy, successful, and driven Springsteen has a knack for inhabiting characters who are impoverished, defeated, and aimless.

The ability to communicate ideas and emotions through performance is a difficult skill to master; lived experience is of no advantage if you don't have the tools to make it real for the audience. Springsteen's adeptness with those tools and his attention to detail to  are what give his work its authenticity. Like Martin Scorsese, who grew up asthmatic in Little Italy studying the local street hoods through his bedroom window, Bruce grew up watching: watching the hot rodders at the gas station across the street from his house, watching his father working a series of dead end jobs, watching friends go off to Vietnam.

Back in 1977 he recorded a song called "The Promise" that contains the line "Inside I felt like I was carrying the broken spirits / of all the other ones who lost" and then shelved it for decades, perhaps because it was a little too confessional. Even now the wealthy, successful, and driven Springsteen has a knack for inhabiting characters who are impoverished, defeated, and aimless. Western Stars has its share of broken spirits.

Musically the album is an enjoyable throwback to the AM radio sounds of Jimmy Webb and Neil Diamond. These stories of stark lives are drenched in lush arrangements. He's experimented with these sounds before on the occasional song but here the horns and strings work their influence from beginning to end.

The album opens with "Hitchhiking", a pleasant catchy tune that would not have been out of place on We Shall Overcome with its hillbilly crooning and jaunty banjo. We meet a number of characters who could be older versions of people we've met before in Springsteen land. The "family man" could be a matured and resolved version of the kid from "The River", and the old "gearhead in a souped up seventy-two" eager to show off his machine might have been "Racing in the Street" in a "sixty-nine Chevy with a 396" way back in '78.

The tone quickly changes, however, and  on the album's second song as we meet another wanderer with a different groove. "The Wayfarer" doesn't really sound like anything Bruce has done before. I never thought I would say a Springsteen song made me think of Burt Bacharach, but there it is. Emotionally we change gears as well. Unlike the cheerful "Hitchhiker", this wanderer seems restless and driven:

Some folks are inspired sitting by the fire
Slippers tucked under the bed
But when I go to sleep I can't count sheep 
For the white lines in my head

The title track is a character study of a b-list actor past his prime, and it introduces the themes of fantasy and reality: the reality of the western environment clashing with the illusions of film westerns and real estate development. The folly of trying to turn the west into suburbia is apparent in the line where the actor notices a coyote running by with "someone's chihuahua in its teeth". There's no taming what Bruce once called a "land of peace, love, justice, and no mercy".


Later in the song, when the has-been actor leaves the set to ride off into the desert, suddenly the horns burst in and we feel the cramped trailer open up to an wide open vista, as if we had just shifted from a boxy TV image  to widescreen VistaVision. It is a very cinematic moment.

Not all of the songs are classics. "Sleepy Joe's Cafe" sounds like a commercial for a chain restaurant you don't want to visit. Taken within the album as a whole though, it makes sense to break up the desolation with some cheesy hoopla, so the song does serve a purpose. Again, Springsteen builds albums, individual songs always serve the vision of the larger piece.

Springsteen came from a Roman Catholic family that lived across the street from the parish church, and in his own words "I grew up literally surrounded by God". He was an altar boy and went to a parochial school. In those pre Vatican II days, the nuns could be harsh; he has often told the story of the teacher who would make him sit in the garbage can because he was "trash". His spirituality has always been cautious and ambiguous; his songs often have religious references but he has never been as open about his beliefs as his friend Bono. His early songs played with and often skewered Catholic imagery, such as the unreleased 1972 track "If I Was the Priest"

Now old sweet Virgin Mary, she runs the Holy Grail saloon
Where for a nickel they'll give you whiskey and a personally blessed balloon

while "Lost in the Flood" from his 1973's Greetings From Asbury Park has this image:

Nuns run bald through Vatican halls, pregnant, pleadin' immaculate conception

A twenty two year old rebelling against his childhood faith; to quote Casablanca, "I am shocked! Shocked!"

Later in his career, however, he discovered folk and country music, and became fascinated by images of rural Protestantism. He didn't always seem to grasp the theology, however, as in these lines from the album Nebraska:

Take the baby to the river, Kyle William they call him
Wash the baby in the water, take away little Kyle's sins

Congregations that meet down by the river typically do not practice infant baptism. That said, the song "Reason to Believe" is a mature grappling with faith and doubt, a set of vignettes of people struggling to maintain belief in seemingly lost causes.

Those same themes and images have echoed through the albums since, and Western Stars is no exception. The new album keeps its feet on the dusty earth, but it hints at hope in songs like "Tuscon Train", where the singer is waiting for his loved one to arrive. Waiting for a train is a familiar western trope, but it also makes a good metaphor for the hope we have in our Divine Love. Reading between the lines of the song, however, it's not at all certain that she is on board.  Hope is not a sure thing; it is instead faith in the face of uncertainty.


Doubt is an unavoidable complication of any faith. Some traditions try to stamp out all vestiges of doubt, but suppressing questions and concerns doesn't make them go away. They eventually come out in one form or another, typically at either extreme. The denial of doubt can lead to smug fundamentalism or cynical nihilism: a rigid calcified faith that kills the spirit by fixating on the letter of the law or a complete rejection of all belief. Many young people abandon faith altogether when they go off to college and learn that many of the verities that they were given in sunday school simply don't hold up to close scrutiny. They don't realize that this sort of questioning, as Psychiatrist M. Scott Peck puts it, "is usually a necessary step in the movement from a simplistic, hand-me-down faith to a faith of mature simplicity that lies on the other side of complexity." Theologian James Fowler, who describes six levels of spiritual understanding in his book Stages of Faith, sees this sort of disenchantment being a necessary condition for moving on to deeper faith and a new enchantment.

You hear this tension between faith and doubt in much of Springsteen's best work. On the 2002 album The Rising there is a delicate balance between hope and despair, between the heavenly "sky of blessed light" the narrator is ascending into on the title track, and the cold emptiness of the shades wandering "the other side" in the song "Paradise". In the new album it is the Western Stars themselves "shining bright again" that bear witness to a transcendent hope that counters the despair below.

Another theme running throughout the album is the challenge of facing oneself honestly, of taking stock.. The phrase "Look at what we've done" is repeated over and over in the soaring ballad "There Goes My Miracle". The narrator in "Stones" who feels the lies he's told his lover sitting like "stones in my mouth", the failed musician in "Somewhere North of Nashville" who traded his lover "for this song", the wanderer in "Hello Sunshine" who comes to the realization that "You fall in love with lonely, you end up that way", all are dealing with consequences that have arisen from decisions they've made and the trajectories that they've followed.



The paths we take and the ways in which we invest our most precious resources, time and attention, cause us to reap accordingly. That's how I understand the Parable of the Talents from the book of St. Matthew, where a rich merchant has left money to his servants to manage while he is travelling abroad. He returns to find that one of the servants simply buried the money for fear of losing it.

...his master replied, ‘You wicked and lazy slave! You knew, did you, that I reap where I did not sow, and gather where I did not scatter?  Then you ought to have invested my money with the bankers, and on my return I would have received what was my own with interest.  So take the talent from him, and give it to the one with the ten talents.  For to all those who have, more will be given, and they will have an abundance; but from those who have nothing, even what they have will be taken away. As for this worthless slave, throw him into the outer darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth

 The parable is a description of how things happen in the world. All of our lives we are investing, whether we know it or not, and the results of unwise investments can be harsh. Not that God is  literally a somewhat unhinged businessman who abuses his employees for not making a profit, but that the nature of reality is such that "weeping and gnashing of teeth" can be the result of not being mindful of the choices we make. The characters hitchhiking, driving, and riding the long desert highways of Western Stars are in the process of discovering this, and should cause us to reflect on our own travels and the turns we've made and the roads we've taken along the way.

Movies You Might Have Missed



Falling From Grace  

John Mellencamp directed and starred in this movie based on a script by Larry McMurtry (The Last Picture Show, Lonesome Dove). He's surprisingly good at both. A country music star from Indiana (of course) returns home at a low point in his career to reassess his life.




Baby It's You

Fellow Jersey Boy John Sayles wrote and directed this coming of age drama, the first movie to feature Springsteen on the soundtrack. Four of Bruce's early songs enhance this story of a romance between a college bound Jewish girl and an aspiring Italian crooner from the wrong side of the tracks. Unlike most high school movies, Baby, It's You continues to follow the main characters after their breakup and graduation, showing the different directions their lives take.






The Border

The Border feels like a Springsteen song. It's the story of a financially strapped border patrolman who struggles with corruption in his profession and guilt over the plight of a young refugee. One of Jack Nicholson's best performances; with his trademark eyebrows often hidden behind sunglasses the usually manic actor holds it all in, simmering like a pressure cooker with a bad valve. The beautiful title song is written and performed by Ry Cooder.




The Wrestler

Springsteen wrote the title song for this movie as favor to down on his luck friend Mickey Rourke. Rourke was one of the great up and coming actors of the 80s, but somehow lost his way. In this inspiring comeback directed by the always fascinating Darren Aronofsky, he plays a professional wrestler who was once a superstar but has now sunk into poverty and obscurity. A bit of typecasting, perhaps, but it is an amazing performance.





Hunter of Invisible Game

This short film / music video is Springsteen's first, and to date only, turn in the director's seat. He also stars in this evocative and visually striking story about a loner finding and returning a boy to his family in what seems to be a rural post apocalyptic landscape.

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