Bruce Springsteen’s face appears on the overwhelming majority of the covers of his twenty-five regular and live albums. But his album Western Stars may be his most unusual album cover of a long career.
One writer who discussed Springsteen’s past covers once noted that “more than anything, Springsteen’s biggest problem is that he’s a little too in love with his own face.” NPR, meanwhile, once labeled his album covers “ugly.”
While you might have to squint to see him on some albums, like Live in Dublin and Springsteen on Broadway, Springsteen appears on the cover of every one of his albums since his 1972 debut Greetings from Asbury Park, NJ in some form. One might discount the choice for that first album as being before a vision of a career of album covers.
The two major exceptions prior to Western Stars, then, to Springsteen album covers are 1982’s Nebraska and 1995’s The Ghost of Tom Joad. The latter features a painting by Eric Dinyer. Dinyer may have have done the painting of a homeless man on the sidewalk before approached about the album (although some may have speculated the painting was meant to represent Springsteen). And now Western Stars, Springsteen’s first album with an animal on the cover.
Much has been written about he lush arrangements on Western Stars and the fact that Springsteen has noted the influence of 1970s California pop and songwriters like Jimmy Webb and Burt Bacharach. So it is worth asking why would Springsteen’s most operatic album be grouped with his two most instrumentally stark albums?
Maybe it is mere coincidence that Springsteen chose to omit his face from Western Stars and those other albums. But an artistic genius like Springsteen more likely thinks these things through. One things that connects the albums is that they all technically are solo outings without the E Street Band. But Springsteen has used his likeness on other albums without the band.
Although Western Stars differs in sound from the sparse instrumentation of Nebraska and the less melodic The Ghost of Tom Joad, the three albums are really about the same things. These albums rely heavily on characters facing hard times and/or personal crises.
It is true that different characters — and even Western characters — appear on other Springsteen albums (“Outlaw Pete,” “Reno,” etc.). But these three albums represent a complete immersion into telling the stories of struggling people, largely against the backdrop of the Western United States. That does not mean the albums are not as personal as songs that might seem more in the voice of the rock singer, like “Born to Run.” Springsteen is still here. But he is taking us somewhere into the souls of other people, teaching us empathy as we go.
Ann Powers at NPR wrote one of the most insightful articles about the new album. In the article, she argues that Springsteen’s songs on Western Stars connect to questions from popular culture in the 1960s and 1970s as in the movie Easy Rider, “Who gets hurt when people, especially men, try to be free?” She recounts how Springsteen uses characters in unstable professions to delve into the problems of modern masculinity: “The men who populate Western Stars have sought freedom and know its edges in an unfree world.”
Western Stars opens with a traveling hitchhiker narrator in the first song and then goes into another song about a traveler, “The Wayfarer.” Another song is in the voice of a stuntman (“Drive Fast (The Stuntman),” another in the voice of a songwriter (“Somewhere North of Nashville”), a crane operator (“Tucson Train”), someone who worked in movies (“Western Star”) and so on.
One may wonder too why Springsteen, who has been prone to comment on current events with his albums, appears to leave politics alone on this album. Whereas Magic reflected on the Bush years and Working on a Dream was a commentary on the Obama election, one may only speculate where Trump is in all of this. One explanation is that Springsteen has been working on this album for a long time. But another explanation is that there is some politics here, with Springsteen mining the minds of Americans feeling excluded from the American Dream.
As for more about the album, songs like “There Goes My Miracle” immediately grabbed me as if I had heard the song my entire life. “Tucson Train” is the most joyous on the album. And the lyrics to songs like “Western Stars” and “Chasin’ Wild Horses” are gut-punchers. For more about the album, Backstreets has an insightful review.
So, returning to our original question, why is Springsteen absent from the cover of Western Stars? It is a good question that makes one delve into the questions Springsteen ponders on this album about the West and displaced men. Discuss among yourselves.
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