Director Thom Zimny has become the audio-visual Boswell to Bruce Springsteen’s Samuel Johnson, having made documentaries about the making of Born to Run and Darkness on the Edge of Town, Springsteen On Broadway and several more. Road Diary takes as its theme Springsteen’s 2023-4 tour, and uses that as a platform for an often emotional survey of his 50 year history with the E Street Band.

Bruce is back! His 21st studio album (can it really be 50 years next year since Greetings from Asbury Park?) and his second covers album. It’s a musical world away from the first, We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions (2006), but like that collection it’s a deep dive into a genre totally different to his own – American soul classics from the 1960s and 1970s.

“I didn’t even know what I was writing about. It was just sent to me”, John Mellencamp has said of Strictly A One-Eyed Jack, his first album in five years.

As he cruises into the autumn of his life, 71 year-old Bruce Springsteen, The Boss, as he's generally known, revisits territory that will sound very familiar to his fans. Perhaps that's what's needed, at this time when those core American values he's sung about with enduring passion seem threatened as never before.

Towards the end of this new documentary, an account of how he recorded his new album Letter to You at his home studio in New Jersey, Bruce Springsteen delivers a eulogy to the E Street Band.

I must confess the sum total of my knowledge of Clarence Clemons before watching this documentary was that he was, for many years before his death in 2011 at the age of 69, the mighty saxophone player in Bruce Springsteen's E Street Band. And what a sax player...

Run is the story of disgruntled 36-ish Finnie (Mark Stanley), a big, dour worker in a fish processing plant in the Aberdeenshire port of Fraserburgh – writer-director Scott Graham’s hometown. Long married to his onetime high-school sweetheart Katie (Amy Manson), and the father of twentyish Kid (Anders Hayward) and adolescent Stevie (Scott Murray), Finnie wants to get the hell out – or he thinks he does.

While there’s usually something for everybody on the Celtic Connections festival programme, where Glasgow’s midwinter festival tends to shine is in its collaborations and special events.

Now the first generation of real rock stars are finishing their fifth recording decade, the question presents itself: what should a rocker do when their career has gone on much longer than they'd planned? 2019 came up with some excellent answers. Some old-timers continued to play loud, others grew more mellow. But one thing they all had in common was that their music journeyed deep into the imagination. 

Filmmakers have an obsession with the music world that is beginning to seem unhealthy. In quick succession we’ve had two Abba musicals, biopics of Freddie Mercury and Elton John, A Star is Born with Lady Gaga and the Beatles fantasy Yesterday, most of which feel pretty B-side.