Springsteen stated in April 2019 that the album was influenced by "Southern California pop music" of the 1970s, including artists such as Glen Campbell and Burt Bacharach.

Upon announcing the album in April 2019, he called it "a return to my solo recordings featuring character-driven songs and sweeping, cinematic orchestral arrangements", with a press release characterizing it as about a "range of American themes, of highways and desert spaces, of isolation and community and the permanence of home and hope".

A limited edition 7" vinyl double A-side single, featuring "Western Stars" and "The Wayfarer", was released on Black Friday Record Store Day on November 29, 2019.

[30] Reviewing for Rolling Stone in May 2019, Will Hermes said that, while several songs "straddle the classic and the cliché", the album's music "evokes country-tinged California pop from the Sixties and Seventies, sounding like nothing [Springsteen]'s done before".

[24] Writing for NME, Thomas Smith regarded Western Stars as "majestic in its scale, but traditional in its subject matter and narratives … a wonderful thing.

"[31] Sam Sodomsky from Pitchfork said, "Springsteen returns with elegiac and wise songwriting conjuring the golden expanse of the American West; it’s his best studio album in years.

"[20] The songs were also regarded by Alexis Petridis as "strong enough to withstand the treatment" and rarely reducing themselves to pastiches of "the grownup American pop of Glen Campbell's collaborations with Jimmy Webb or Harry Nilsson's [recordings] of 'Everybody's Talkin'' and 'I Guess the Lord Must Be in New York City'."

Writing in The Guardian, Petridis hoped Springsteen will "take more stylistic detours in the future", as "it adds up to an album that manages to be both unexpected and of a piece with its author’s back catalogue.

"The combination of twanging western rock and orchestra has a confected, forced feel", he said, adding that "the effect is intended to dignify the lives of the hard-bitten individuals in his lyrics, but instead it sounds like they are being smothered by overbearing string and horn arrangements.