On his nineteenth album (and first in five years) rock and roll legend / Broadway star Bruce Springsteen is turning his gaze to the “West,” and the results are a totally unique, if not polarizing, new entry into his lauded body of work. Western Stars utilizes the sounds of late 60’s Capitol Records (Glen Campbell, The Wrecking Crew, Phil Spector) to color the stories of men on the frontier, not just of America, but the edges of their lives.

Is Western Stars a fine return to form for the Boss or a stylistic bridge too far? Tune in to an all-new episode of Discologist as we tackle these questions and much, much more.

Whether you see Born In The U.S.A. as Springsteen’s most significant achievement as an artist or just a strange, 80’s sounding outlier in an otherwise muscular catalog, it remains to this day one of the most potent statements about the down-and-out in America ever made.

Despite its rock ‘n’ roll sheen, misunderstood rallying cries, and anthems to nostalgia, Born In The U.S.A. was a hopelessly bleak look at what it meant to be an American in the wake of the Vietnam War that, thirty-five years later, still resonates across generations, class, and race. A monument to the ‘everyman,’ it marked the end of an era for Springsteen that, despite its darkness, finally launched him into the pop stratosphere that he and the E Street Band had been chasing for more than a decade.

On an all-new Discologist, we’re dissecting this classic to get to the heart of its persistent relevance today, how it shapes the long-view of Springsteen’s career and a particularly “moist” song that also happens to be particularly great.