Overview
Bruce Springsteen's first new studio album in five years takes his music to a new place, drawing inspiration in part from the Southern California pop records of the late '60s and early '70s. The album was recorded primarily at Springsteen's home studio in New Jersey, with additional recording in California and New York. Columbia Records released Springsteen's 19th studio album on June 14, 2019. "This record is a return to my solo recordings featuring character driven songs and sweeping, cinematic orchestral arrangements", says Springsteen. "It's a jewel box of a record." The 13 tracks of Western Stars encompass a sweeping range of American themes, of highways and desert spaces, of isolation and community and the permanence of home and hope. The album was recorded primarily at Springsteen's home studio in New Jersey, with additional recording in California and New York.
In an interview in Variety, Springsteen reacted to the question if Western Stars was his most recent burst of writing? "Yeah, I would say so, which is unusual because I wrote most of that before [2012's] "Wrecking Ball", and I stopped making that record to make "Wrecking Ball", and then I went back to it. So it's been awhile since I've written, but that's not unusual. That's occurred plenty of other times in my working life. It's the record I wrote before Wrecking Ball but could not finish, and in attempting to finish it, I wrote "Wrecking Ball". So the roots of the record go back quite a ways. Sometimes you have to wait for these puzzles to sort themselves out, and it can take years. I mean, I have a record that I've been working on that's 20 years old. That's just the way the process is working at the moment."