[This past June, Bruce Springsteen released Tracks 2, a stunning collection featuring 7 previously unreleased full albums (totaling 9 LPs) from the early 80s through the late 2010s. It’s full of great music, but our favorite was Inyo, an album that connects to so many American histories. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy four songs & the album overall!]
How we can see Inyo as a vital complement to a great recent album, and why it’s much more than that.
In the beautiful bridge of “Western Stars,” the title track to Bruce Springsteen’s excellent 2019 album of the same name, the unnamed speaker—a former bit player in film Westerns (“Once I was shot by John Wayne, yeah, it was towards the end”) who has been reduced to acting in commercials and living off his semi-fame (“That one scene’s bought me a thousand drinks/Set me up and I’ll tell it for you, friend”)—adds an interesting new community into the song’s landscape: “Sundays I take my El Camino, throw my saddle in and go/East to the desert where the charros, they still ride and rope/Our American brothers cross the wire and bring the old ways with them/Tonight the western stars are shining bright again.” As far as I can remember, that’s the album’s only overt reference to Hispanic Americans, and while I wish there more, I really love that in the title track Springsteen not only includes that community, but also rightfully has his white speaker call them “Our American brothers.”
Western Stars is perhaps my wife’s favorite Bruce album (it’s definitely on the short list, anyway), and through revisiting it (and also watching Thom Zimny’s stunning film adaptation) with her I’ve come to appreciate it as well (especially the first half, from “Hitch Hikin’” through “Chasin’ Wild Horses”; I think it loses its way a bit in the second, although I absolutely love the final song, “Moonlight Motel”). But in truth, I think it needed Inyo to fully succeed in its goals of representing the myths and realities, the memories and stories, the conflicts and communities of the American West (all themes with which Bruce has been obsessed for a long time). On Western Stars Springsteen portrays those themes in overarching ways, with largely universal songs that could be depicting characters of any race, ethnicity, culture, etc. (with the exception of that bridge in “Western Stars,” that is); while Inyo both connects those overarching themes to Mexican American and indigenous communities and reminds us that the American West, perhaps more than any other part of this foundationally diverse nation, has always been unbelievably multicultural in the worst and the best ways.
So Western Stars is improved significantly when paired with Inyo; but while I think the latter album also benefits from the pairing, I would want to make the strongest possible argument that Inyo doesn’t need any other album or work to be both great and important. I won’t pretend to have a completely exhaustive knowledge of American cultural history (not yet—I’ve still got time!), but I really don’t know many works by white American artists, in any medium, that portray multilayered Mexican American histories and communities with more depth and thoughtfulness than does this previously unreleased “lost” album from the Boss. To say that that project is even more important in 2025 than it would have been at any prior point in our history is both to state the obvious and to add one more layer to the case for why Inyo is a truly important addition to our cultural landscape.
October Recap this weekend,
Ben
PS. What do you think? Favorites from Tracks 2 you’d share?
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