Springsteen Comes Alive

Dear listeners,

In October 2020 — a time when a lot of touring musicians were wondering when, and if, they’d ever play live again — I interviewed Bruce Springsteen over video chat.* He was preparing to release “Letter to You,” his first album with the E Street Band in six years, and he knew that putting out an E Street Band album without an accompanying tour was, to his fans, a total tease.

He’d just turned 71; the fleeting nature of time was on his mind and all over his album, from the elegiac ballad “One Minute You’re Here” to “Last Man Standing,” a rocking tribute to the late members of the band he joined as a teenager, the Castiles. After the 2018 death of the guitarist and vocalist George Theiss, Springsteen was the group’s last surviving member.

In our conversation, Springsteen was palpably antsy to get back on the road — he knew precious time was wasting. “My band is at its best,” he said, “and we have so much accumulated knowledge and craft about what we do that this was a time in my life where I said, ‘I want to use that as much as I can.’”

He told me that the original plan had been to tour with the E Street Band in 2021, but “I would say we’ll be lucky if it’s 2022” — a year that, at that time, felt impossibly far away. (As it turned out, Springsteen would take the stage in 2021, albeit a smaller and less populated one than he’d imagined; his solo “Springsteen on Broadway” show, which had its initial, 236-date run in 2017 and 2018, returned for a limited, 31-date run in New York from June to September.)

His prediction wasn’t far from the mark: On Feb. 1, 2023, Springsteen and the E Street Band finally kicked off a 90-date international tour, playing their first show together in seven years. I caught them at Madison Square Garden on Saturday night, and they sounded every bit as tight and spirited as they did the last time I’d seen them there, on the River Tour in 2016.

An E Street Band show is an ensemble performance, a veritable rock ’n’ roll circus of eclectic personalities — at its most crowded, there were 18 musicians onstage — each receiving a solo moment in the spotlight. I would personally like to shout out Curtis King for his angelic falsetto vocals on the cover of the Commodores’ “Nightshift,” Max Weinberg for — still! at 71! — being a drummer of exceptional steadiness and flair; and Little Steven, for the continued glory of just being Little Steven, day in and day out.

Maybe you’ll get to see Springsteen on this tour. And maybe you won’t — some people still don’t feel comfortable sharing a respiratory experience with 20,000 strangers, and let’s not forget that these shows are happening during a particularly rocky moment for ticket buyers. So if you can’t make it out to one of the concerts — or if you did and want to keep reliving it — I have a playlist for you.

It’s culled from my favorite live versions of Springsteen songs that the band played on April 1 at Madison Square Garden. There are only 10, but it’s still well over an hour long, because it’s Bruce. It represents a variety of venues and eras in the band’s five-decade run, including what a lot of Springsteen aficionados believe to be the greatest live recording of “Born to Run,” from an August 1985 show at Giants Stadium in East Rutherford, N.J. (Every one of them who doesn’t believe that is probably drafting me an email right now.)

It includes a wild, 16-minute (!) rendition of “Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out” and the sparse, poetic solo reading of “Thunder Road” from the 2018 recording of “Springsteen on Broadway,” which blew me away when I was lucky enough to see it in 2021. If you’re avoiding set-list spoilers, I will say: This is only about a third of the material that the band has been playing on this tour, and most of these songs were likely to make the set list anyway — but you do you.

Of course, even the all-time greatest playlist of Bruce Springsteen live cuts will not replicate the experience of seeing him — or anybody, really — in concert. I’ll give the last word to the Boss himself, who, at the end of our interview, was bemoaning the loss of live performances (in quotes that didn’t make the final piece). “It’s still important, and it’s an experience that cannot yet be simulated,” he said. Even then-trendy livestreams didn’t cut it: “It’s not the same as being in a little room, or even a stadium, wherever you are, and having that music wash over you while standing next to your neighbors and friends. There’s still just that.”

Show a little faith, there’s magic in the night,

Lindsay

*I am from New Jersey, so telling this to anyone in my family was sort of like saying I was going to Skype with Shakespeare. The assignment came together at the last minute, and as I was prepping I decided I could not tell my mother about it until after it had happened, because she was going to freak out in such a way that would have made me even more nervous than I already was. Her reaction — “no … no …. NOOOOO!” — when I called her after the interview confirmed that this was indeed the right decision. Hi, Mom!

The Amplifier Playlist

Listen on Spotify. We update this playlist with each new newsletter.

“Springsteen Comes Alive” track list
Track 1: “No Surrender” (Live at the Wachovia Spectrum; October 2009)
Track 2: “Out in the Street” (Live at Madison Square Garden; June/July 2000)
Track 3: “Trapped” (Live at the Meadowlands; August 1984)
Track 4: “Johnny 99” (Live at Giants Stadium; August 1985)
Track 5: “Backstreets” (Live at the Roxy Theater, July 1978)
Track 6: “Because the Night” (Live at Nassau Coliseum, December 1980)
Track 7: “Jungleland” (Live at Madison Square Garden, June/July 2000)
Track 8: “Thunder Road” (“Springsteen on Broadway” version)
Track 9: “Born to Run” (Live at Giants Stadium, August 1985)
Track 10: “Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out” (Live at Madison Square Garden; June/July 2000)

Bonus tracks

“This, too, is the promise that has always been sold in Bruce Springsteen’s music. The ability to make the most out of your life, because it’s the only life you have.” I love this essay that the great critic and poet Hanif Abdurraqib wrote upon seeing the River Tour in 2016, reflecting on music, American myths and the experience of being Black at a Springsteen show.

Also, here’s a June 2021 dispatch from the reopening of “Springsteen on Broadway” by me and our chief theater critic Jesse Green, debating whether it was live theater or a rock concert. Writing it the next day, I was still in awe of that rendition of “Thunder Road” — which is why I included this version on today’s playlist — and reassessing a song I thought I knew inside and out.