Inside Hank Azaria’s Bruce Springsteen Safeguard Band

A few months Again, the creator of simpsons They’re in for a shock after listening to Hank Azaria’s latest batch of voice-acting recordings. For 36 years, he has presented a gamut of Springfield’s animated people, from Leading Wiggum to Comedian Keep Man to Bartender Moe. Now, despite this fact, all of them were sounding roughly… hoarse. Azaria knew exactly what was wrong, but he kept his explanation opaque. “I’m working on a thing,” he said, and eventually re-recorded one of the key performances.

The article in question is Azaria’s tidal passion, an undertaking into which he has been putting so much of his age and effort, an undertaking that is as close to his center as anything he has done in his profession. In his 60s, the six-time Emmy winner is on the brink of burnout, sweating the streets of a fugitive American dream, moving forward like a spirit in the night as a harbinger of his personal life, Bruce. Springsteen Security Band. “My whole life is about sharing vocal impressions,” Azaria says on a sweltering-hot June afternoon. “This is, in some ways, the pinnacle of that for me.” He is sitting in his impressive Higher West Aspect rental, which is situated on a development site belonging to the Central Ground. At 60, Azaria is impressively fit, with 1980s Bruce-worthy biceps hidden beneath his light V-neck tee. On the wall opposite him is an exuberant canvas, a cartoonishly precise exotic clay created by the pop-surrealist painter Kenny Scharf.

Hank Azaria & the Easy Side Road Band’s first official concert will take place on August 1 at New York’s Le Poisson Rouge, with web proceeds committed to their social-justice-themed charitable foundation. They have considered some alternative venues for the autumn, and sooner or later they would love to expand the venture to filling 2000-seat theatres. “I think of it as a dramatic performance,” he says. “Even though I’m telling stories about myself, I’m still in character as Bruce. It’s a performance piece, but I’m not a Bruce impersonator.”

Azaria has been working for months to develop his Springsteen impression and at one stage his vocal cords were being strained – and at one stage even injured. He has also attempted to understand his spoken word expression, which he compares to a mix of “Frank Pantegelli”. Saint and Scatman Crowther.” Azaria initially assembled his band, built around keyboardist Adam Cromello, for a one-off performance in front of “everyone I used to know” at his sixtieth festival held at the Town Vineyard in April. Azaria says, “I had feelings about turning 60 and I thought, ‘What fun would it be?'” He told his friends that a “great Bruce Springsteen cover band” would be the celebratory entertainment, outside. Steps regarding exit frontman.

Despite a lifetime of acting, including on Broadway, where he earned a Tony nomination for his work spamlot In 2005, Azaria nearly collapsed from extreme fear before the event. “I was very nervous,” he says. “I was more nervous that day than any other performance in my life. To be honest, I had a panic attack. I was like, ‘What am I doing? this is insane. this is insane!’ And I had a full-blown panic attack. I was sweating and I actually threw up. I have never been troubled with nervousness in my life.”

As soon as he overcame his anxiety and took the stage, Azaria and the band performed well, and he found the experience so enjoyable that he decided to continue. “On the Monday after the party, I was sitting here,” he recalls. “That Monday morning I was offered two acting jobs. I turned them both down and spent the whole morning trying to get on with the band.”

simpsons There has been a very stable and profitable schedule, which has allowed Azaria almost complete freedom in his profession, as well as investing in his treasure paintings and, in recent years, the Easy Side Road Band. In 2020, he declined to voice Kwik-E-Mart owner Apu and other non-white characters on the show, and later apologized repeatedly on the field, having previously taken those roles in the park. Is. Apart from those problems, he is well aware of his excellent fortune. “I’m the luckiest man in show business,” he says, joking that if young actors ask for recommendations, his response is, “Join a cartoon show that’s been running for 36 years. And then don’t worry about anything.” (He has assured that season 36, which is in the works for autumn these days, won’t be extreme: “I think we would know if we were finishing, because they’d probably be like, ‘This is it.'” There’ll be a big talk about the final season.'”)

And, specifically, why has Azaria taken advantage of his significant freedom in creating the song “Jungleland” on stage? He has been taking alcohol addiction medication since getting sober around 2006, and back when he started drinking at age 14, Springsteen was his musical hero. “Nostalgia has taken on a different meaning over the last 40 years,” says Azaria. “It becomes a painful kind of longing… Now I do the work I do with recovering alcoholics and adult children from dysfunctional families. Most of them work, and your inner teen is really a thing. The teenager in me was incredibly excited about it all. ‘We have to be Bruce!’ And of course he is the one who vomited. But I feel like he is the one who is involved in all this, and it is his happiness that gets expressed. He smiles, and murmurs, “If it doesn’t sound too weird.”