Nothing can quite prepare you for Western Stars, Springsteen's homage to classic artists like Glen Cambell and Burt Bacharach. It's not just the presence of horns and strings. What really leaves you open-mouthed is the voice. Gone is the trademark sand and grit, and in its place, we get an effortless-yet-weary, country croon.

It's all a far cry from the Boss's work with the E Street Band. The musical arrangements hark straight back to a golden age of orchestral pop and songs like "Wichita Lineman". Melodies swoop, and strings rise. There are sad muted horns and tinkles of electric piano. When the strings recede, underneath are country guitars.

The whole album is soaked in the early Seventies. This is a world of long distances, loneliness and, above all, nostalgia. The songs are populated with broken-hearted drifters and worn-out has-beens. Like the faded actor in the title track reduced to boring strangers in motel bars. Or the physically broken stuntman on "Drive Fast" who reminds you of Springsteen's "The Wrestler" from 2008. The difference, of course, is in the delivery. Gliding strings make the stuntman's tale feel yearning rather than desolate. 

Other songs are simply sumptuous. The soaring vocals on "There Goes My Miracle" sound almost like the Walker Brothers. And yet, it still feels deceptively weighty. By locating the songs in a place just out of reach, Springsteen taps into universal feelings of ageing and longing. The album's climax, "Chasin' Wild Horses" is as powerful as anything he's ever done. 

What Springsteen purists will make of Western Stars remains to be seen. Some may consider it a curiosity. Others, no doubt, will be convinced that the Boss should spend his time alternating between albums that sound a bit like Nebraska and Born to Run. But even rock stars need to mellow out. Springsteen is now almost 70. Surely, projects like this and his recent Broadway residency are exactly the sort of thing he should be doing. 

• More New Music reviews on theartsdesk

@russcoffey

 Overleaf: find the lyric video for "Hello Sunshine"

Here’s a strange thing: sit in a quiet room reading through the poems that make up Kate Tempest’s third album and her swirling collage of words drags you in. It’s an opaque concept work, mingling themes of a broken Britain, teetering on the brink of socio-political disaster, with the gritty, urban search for love in a time where sex is served up like fast food.

This debut feature from Mark Gillis is a film of real anger and considerable tenderness.

Anyone familiar with Calexico and Iron & Wine will be unsurprised by Years to Burn. The 32-minute album (one track of which is a short instrumental) showcases lilting, mid-paced, reflective, country tinged and acoustic-bedded songs fleshed out with piano and Mexican-styled brass.

Sadness abounds in Avicii's posthumous third album. In context, even the plaintive single syllable of the title is full of pathos. It reminds of the real person, the Swede Tim Bergling who as a teenager discovered he had an unerring ability to hit the commercial sweet spot with his dance productions, and rocketed to global giga-fame.

On one level it’s a paean to stylistic pluralism, on another it’s a love letter to his wife. First and foremost, though, Taller sees Jamie Cullum staking out new ground as a singer-songwriter, adeptly aided by his long-time collaborator and friend – the conductor, arranger, multi-instrumentalist and producer, Troy Miller.

A chronic recycler, Dennis Potter fashioned five feature films from his earlier TV dramas and another from one of his novels. The best of them are 1985’s Dreamchild (from the BBC's Alice, 1965) and Track 29 (1987), which he adapted from the BBC's Schmoedipus (1974).

Outside the Palladium a couple of months back for Joan Baez’s farewell, I was given a flyer for this album – by Naomi Bedford herself it turns out. We had a brief chat which left me with a good feeling about the project and I was disappointed to see I’d be away for the London concert marking the launch of Singing It All Back Home: Appalachian Ballads of English and Scottish Origin. 

You hear a lot about living legends, but there aren’t actually that many around – at least not since the first half of 2016. Carlos Santana, however, definitely fits the bill. From his early days stealing the show at Woodstock alongside drummer Michael Shrieve, to achieving bone fide icon status for his pioneering work in the field of fusion solos, he’s at a stage where he can do pretty much whatever he wants. 

June 2017 witnessed a musical miracle, of sorts – the resurrection to recording and brilliant songwriting of Peter Perrett, The Only Ones’ singer, songwriter, and architect of his own ghoulish entombment in a Gothic south east London pile, fielding serious addictions for decades and emerging only briefly in 1996 for his excellent Woke Up Sticky album, and the publication of Nina Antonia’s biogra