Which one of these doesn’t belong with the others?:
Police Chief Clancy Wiggum; tavern owner Moe Szyslak; nuclear-plant worker Carl Carlson; Bruce Springsteen.
If you said “Bruce Springsteen,” you are incorrect. That’s because it was a trick question: All four have been voiced by veteran actor Hank Azaria. The first three, of course, are among the characters he has brought to life for more than 35 years on “The Simpsons.” More recently, he has been portraying Springsteen as the lead singer of Hank Azaria & The EZ Street Band, which performs the music of the Bard of Asbury Park and his revered backup unit, the E Street Band. The group is scheduled to perform Aug. 23 at the Music Box inside Borgata Hotel Casino & Spa.
It all began, he explained during a recent phone chat, with a milestone birthday in April, 2024.
“I was turning 60 and I wasn’t thrilled about that,” he recalled with a chuckle. “I felt it would be sad to ignore that birthday, but I didn’t know what to do. And somehow, as you get older, nostalgia takes on a different level of potency. I was listening to [the classic-rock of his youth] more, and it meant a lot more to me. And I just thought it might be fun to invite everyone I’ve ever known to City Winery in New York.
“It was like I created a high school reunion and a college reunion and a Broadway reunion. I ended up with 550 people there. Most of my friends are Springsteen fans. And I told them, ‘I’ve got this great Springsteen tribute band coming.’ But I didn’t tell them that I was working for months to learn to sing like Bruce.”
As it turned out, Azaria, whose film credits include “Quiz Show,” “The Birdcage” and “Night At the Museum: The Battle of The Smithsonian,” got a lot more than he bargained for when he conceived of the ostensible one-off performance.
“I fell into this obsessive rabbit hole of just, mimicking and singing like Bruce as closely as I could,” he continued. “And I’m a ‘vocal geek’–it is what I do. And I have never worked harder, been more obsessed by any accent or voice or character.
“I’ve been imitating the way Bruce talks since I was 12 because I love him and I listen to those bootlegs and the talks he’d give and I’d imitate him,” he said in Springsteen’s familiar rasp.
“But,” he continued in his normal speaking voice, “singing like Bruce is another thing, especially with that rasp. It’s really, really hard to sing like that and not to show your vocal cords. But to me, I’m not singing, I’m imitating Bruce. So, it’s like was a trick, like I sort of tricked myself into” imitating Springsteen.
“What I did was, I spent the first few months just trying to sing just on my own. Just like, let me see if I can capture Bruce’s singing voice through my own mimicry abilities. And then once I felt like I sort of was making sounds like Bruce, I brought in a vocal coach and said, ‘Now teach me how to support this and actually sing this so it sounds better and I’m not destroying my throat.”
The hard work has clearly paid off: YouTube videos of Springsteen signatures like “Born to Run” and “Glory Days” suggest Azaria and his nine-piece EZ Street Band have indeed put in the work to capture the sound—and spirit–of a Springsteen/E Street Band performance. And with his all-black stage wardrobe lean physique and close-cropped hair, the veteran actor who has appeared on Broadway in Monty Python’s “Spamalot” and “All In: A Comedy About Love,” which ran last winter, offers an equally convincing visual facsimile.
As he noted above, Azaria, who donates all of his concerts’ proceeds to his 30-year-old non-profit organization, Four Through Nine Foundation, which supports efforts in education, wellness, environmental activism and social justice, is hardly a Bruce-Come-Lately when it comes to his subject.
“I was in summer camp when I was 12 in 1976, and my buddy was playing the ‘Born to Run’ album and I said, “What is that?’ And he got angry at me and said, ‘What do you mean what is that? What’s the matter with you? It’s Bruce Springsteen!’ And I was like, ‘I never heard him before.’ But I fell in love with that album that summer.”
Azaria–who’ll be seen portraying Thomas Edison in the set-in-the-Gilded Age murder mystery, “The Artist,” which will drop this fall on the free-streaming service The Network–has yet to come face-to-face with his musical hero. But The Boss is absolutely aware of Azaria’s efforts.
“It’s just a crazy story,” he offered. “My son’s 15, and one of his school friend’s dad is a dentist who I’ve become friendly with; he’s a Jersey Shore guy and has seen our band a few times and he’s always asking me to send him our latest video, which I do.
“And one day two weeks ago, I get a text from him. He’s at his office, and he pans the camera over and it’s Bruce in his dentist’s chair., And he says [again in his Springsteen voice], ‘I’m sitting here with a terrible toothache…I’ve been fabulously entertained by your version of “Prove It All Night.” I gotta say, you did an excellent job, and that band is really something!
“‘So, keep going, man. Keep on going. Don’t stop.’
“I literally cried for a solid day.”
For tickets, go to ticketmaster.com
