Insights into Hank Azaria’s Bruce Springsteen cover band

A few months back, the producers of The simpsons were confused when they heard Hank Azaria’s latest voice recordings. For 36 years, he brought a significant portion of Springfield’s animated population to life, from Chief Wiggum to Comic Book Guy to Moe the bartender. Now, though, all of those guys sounded kind of… hoarse. Azaria knew exactly what was going on, but his explanation remained vague. “I’m working on something,” he said, and eventually re-recorded some of the performances.

It’s about Azaria’s current obsession, a project he’s poured a lot of time and energy into, an endeavor as dear to his heart as anything he’s done in his career. At 60, the six-time Emmy winner is preparing to perform all night, sweating on the streets of a runaway American dream and moving like a ghost through the night as the frontman of his own Bruce Springsteen cover band. “My whole life is about sharing vocal impressions,” Azaria says on a sweltering late June afternoon. “This is, in some ways, the pinnacle of that for me.” He’s sitting in his spectacular Upper West Side apartment, which takes up an entire floor of a building overlooking Central Park. At 60, Azaria is impressively wiry, and ’80s Bruce-worthy biceps lurk beneath his black V-neck T-shirt. On the opposite wall hangs a huge canvas, a fittingly cartoonish alien landscape by pop-surrealist painter Kenny Scharf.

Hank Azaria and the EZ Street Band will make their first official appearance at Le Poisson Rouge in Manhattan on August 1. All proceeds will go to his social justice nonprofit foundation. He has a few other venues reserved for the fall and would like to eventually expand the project to fill 2,000-seat theaters. “I think of it as a theatrical performance,” he says. “I stay in my role as Bruce, even as I tell stories about myself. It’s a piece of performance, but I’m not a Bruce impersonator.”

Azaria has stretched his vocal cords for months – and even injured them in the process – to develop his Springsteen imitation. He has even tried to perfect his speaking voice, which he describes as a mixture of “Frank Pantegeli from The Godfather and Scatman Crothers.” Azaria originally assembled his band, led by keyboardist Adam Kromelow, for a one-off performance in front of “everyone I’ve ever known” at his 60th birthday party, held at downtown’s City Winery in April. “I had feelings about my 60th birthday,” Azaria says, “and I thought, ‘What would be fun?'” He told friends that a “great Bruce Springsteen cover band” would provide the party’s entertainment, leaving out the part about the frontman.

Despite his lifelong commitment, including on Broadway, where he was known for his work in Spamalot In 2005, Azaria almost got stage fright before the performance. “I was so nervous,” he says. “I was more nervous that day than I’ve ever been before any other performance in my life. To be honest, I had a panic attack. I thought, ‘What am I doing? This is crazy. This is crazy!’ And I had a full-blown panic attack. I was sweating and I actually threw up. I’ve never thrown up from nervousness in my life.”

After overcoming his fear and stepping on stage, things went well for Azaria and the band, and he found the experience so captivating that he decided to continue. “The Monday after the party, I was sitting right here,” he recalls. “That Monday morning, I was offered two acting jobs. I turned them both down and spent the entire morning working with the band on the next steps.”

The simpsons was an extraordinarily stable and lucrative job that allowed Azaria near-total freedom in his career and funded his charity work and, more recently, the EZ Street Band. In 2020, he stopped lending his voice to Kwik-E-Mart owner Apu and other non-white characters on the show, and since then he has repeatedly apologized profusely for taking on those roles in the first place. Those issues aside, he’s well aware of his luck. “I’m the luckiest man in show business,” he says. He jokes that when young actors ask him for advice, he replies, “Go on an animated series that runs for 36 years. And then you don’t have to worry about anything.” (He’s confident that season 36, currently in the works for fall, won’t be the last: “I think we would know when we ended because they’d probably make a big deal out of it, ‘this is the last season.'”)

And why did Azaria take advantage of his remarkable freedom to sing “Jungleland” onstage? He’s been in alcohol treatment since 2006, when he got sober, and when he started drinking at 14, Springsteen was his musical hero. “After 40, nostalgia takes on a different meaning,” Azaria says. “It becomes this painful kind of longing… A lot of my work in rehabilitation involves adult children of alcoholics and broken homes, and the inner teenager is literally a thing. My inner teenager was incredibly excited about all of this. ‘We get to be Bruce!’ And he’s also the one who was throwing up, clearly. But I felt like it was him being channeled in all of this, and his joy being expressed.” He smiles, adding, almost murmuring, “If that doesn’t sound too weird.”