For as long as I can remember Bruce Springsteen has been a part of my musical vocabulary, as I’m sure he is for many people born in the 1980s, however Western Stars marks the first new album from the New Jersey native since I first properly started exploring his music in any meaningful way (last year’s …On Broadway being a nice exploratory primer).

Western Stars finds The Boss without his E-Street Band and in a reflective mood, taking a relaxed road trip through an America that exists away from the spotlights of the seemingly all encompassing eye of either Hollywood or the mainstream news media (both of which have become equally important in recent years), all bedded in the kind of Americana you might find in a mid-century television western, but brought up to date.

Hitch Hikin’ and Wayfarer set the scene for this, both thematically and in terms of the music, before single Tucson Train builds on this but ends up actually being one of the disc’s less memorable offerings.

The title track then feels like it captures something of Springsteen’s own outlook.

It has a feel of hope but expressed from a perspective of experience and, dare I say it, older age. Across the rest of the album it feels as if he is exploring what could be dubbed ‘Trump’s America’ but without focusing on the extremes, looking at the normal people — and it’s in this he finds that aforementioned hope.

That hope exists in finding that the country he grew up in and, in his own way, has celebrated throughout his career, is still there, even if it may have got lost behind the fog of ‘fake news’.

As it goes on this continues with vignettes into lives that feel real — they are never perfect but they have a sense of reality to them. These are highlighted by two tracks in particular.

The first is the more upbeat tale of a mom and pop business Sleepy Joe’s Cafe that traces a story from the end of the Second World War to today through its ups and downs.

The second is Drive Fast (The Stuntman) that, as the title suggests, looks at the life of a retired stuntman broken by his job but ‘keeping on keeping on’ and reminiscing about a youth racing cars, bringing into focus the side of Hollywood that is generally less celebrated and capturing another aspect of the American dream and unique Americana culture.

The whole thing rounds off the evocative Moonlight Motel that brings a ‘day in the life’ feeling to the record and closes it on a low-key but satisfying note.

Western Stars is, in many ways, an album that reveals more the more you listen with a depth and complexity that’s not entirely evident on the first spin.

Musically it draws on a lot of Americana tropes and uses them to tell a story and make a point that is political without the extremity or hectoring of most modern political discourse.

In this it shows that, while Springsteen may be ageing in his own particular way, he’s losing none of the conscience or bite he had in his youth and commercial prime, while continually finding new ways to explore the country with which he has become linked in a way few artists could ever be.