This use relates to one of the label's original meetings because it distinguishes the style from other kinds of music, as it did when "pop" began to be used to describe the standards of the middle 20th century -- music that featured big bands and orchestras but which wasn't as intricate as classical symphonies and operas. Vocals and lyrics took center stage in these songs, and instrumental flairs served largely to showcase what singers were doing in front of them. The arranger and band-leader played a major role in giving a song its sound, and often the same song might be recorded or performed by a wide variety of vocalists.
That meaning of "pop" was probably in the back of Bruce Springsteen's mind when he described his latest release, Western Stars, as inspired by the "southern California pop records of the late '60s and early '70s." Such music might have some folky or country twinges but was much more in the vein of the collections of standards recorded ten or twenty years earlier. Western Stars, with its large-scale orchestral arrangements, successfully evokes those sounds on several tracks. But all too often that's as far as the success goes, as Springsteen pairs these arrangements with some of the slightest lyrics he's put on record.
"There Goes My Miracle" may best illustrate the album's clear strengths and weaknesses. Employing an amazing voice that seems like it would be impossible for him to conjure after forty-plus years of four-hour stage shows, Springsteen fronts a moody, atmospheric arrangement -- but with a nine-time repetition "look what you have done," almost as many "walk walkin' away"s and so on. "Hitch-Hikin'" and "Hello Sonshine" are equally spare with their words, also to the degree that they almost seem designed to say nothing.
Springsteen said he wanted to offer some character-centered story songs as in past albums such as Nebraska or Darkness on the Edge of Town. But in those earlier albums, even on the stripped-down Nebraska, the relatively simple arrangements were lyrically dense enough to carry their narrative. That same kind of fully-fleshed storyline shows up on Stars in the title track as well as "Sleepy Joe's Cafe" and "Drive Fast (The Stuntman)" The rest of the lineup displays daubs of color that leave the impressions of characters and maybe even a hint of story, but no true portrait.
In the pop standards sometimes called "The Great American Songbook," arrangers like Billy May or Nelson Riddle knew that the built up sonic wash of strings in one song doesn't always vary much from one in another song. And as the label "standard" suggests, they also knew that they might well be recording the same number host of artists had already recorded. But they didn't intend to create something new from a completely blank slate -- they intended the orchestra or band to create a sonic backdrop for the vocalist to do his or her thing: Frank Sinatra's swagger, Dean Martin's charm, Johnny Hartmann or Nat Cole's raw emotion, Kay Starr's wistful dreaming, and so on.
On Western Stars, Springsteen recreates the sound behind those standards and on far too many numbers he offers songs that certainly could have been written by any number of artists. But at least in this sense of the label, he is not really a pop singer and the genre does not play to his strengths. Sonically it's an interesting experiment and certainly the kind of ambitious project you'd hope an performer of Springsteen's stature would take a shot at. It's more interesting than other late-career disappointments like Workin' on a Dream, but it's a failure nonetheless.
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