Those early 1970s productions were unapologetically decorous, premeditated, luxurious and grown-up. Yet often, in songs like Skeeter Davis’s “The End of the World” or Campbell’s “By the Time I Get to Phoenix,” the plush orchestral pop hits of the 1960s and 1970s cushioned sorrow and solitude. They were worlds away from the turbocharged bar band that would become Springsteen’s E Street Band, and they were clearly aiming for the middle of the road, not the fast lane. The craftsmanship in those studio efforts was as self-effacing as it was substantial; the hired musicians were intended to serve the song, not to be noticed. As a lifelong student of American popular music, Springsteen clearly noticed.

On “Western Stars,” a few songs — “Tucson Train,” “Sundown,” “Stones” — sound like the E Street Band could be swapped in for the orchestra. But Springsteen strives to meet his chosen idiom more than halfway. He wrote songs that thrive on the swells and undulations of orchestral drama, and he sings with long-breathed phrases that aren’t exactly crooning — he’s not built for that — but that set out to sustain more than they exhort.

One of the centerpieces of “Western Stars” is “Chasin’ Wild Horses.” Its narrator did something awful in his youth, then left home to lose himself as a cowboy, chasing wild horses in Montana for the Bureau of Land Management, sometimes shouting a lost love’s name to an empty echo. Its guitar-picking intro bears an odd, doubtless coincidental, resemblance to the Lady Gaga-Bradley Cooper hit “Shallow,” but its gathering impact comes from its expansive arrangement, which opens and deepens around his voice like an endless prairie.

Image Amid Springsteen’s songwriting catalog, “Western Stars” is a side trip in place and time.

The arc of the album — Springsteen still treats an album as a whole — moves from hope to desperation to elegy. The album begins with “Hitch Hikin’,” whose footloose narrator easily gets ride after ride (including one from a “gear head in a souped-up ’72,” to pin down the era). Next is “Wayfarer,” proclaiming chronic wanderlust as strings, horns, glockenspiel, women’s voices and even castanets arrive to cheer him onward.