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Bruce Springsteen Gave Us Exactly What We Need Right Now

His just-finished tour was a cleansing, healing experience—and a morale-boosting call to arms for everyone fighting for our democracy.

Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band in concert at Nationals Park on May 27, 2026, in Washington, DC.

I felt a bit glum when Bruce Springsteen launched his “Land of Hope and Dreams” tour in Manchester, England, last year, and took it on the road across Europe. Not because I didn’t love what he was doing—I wrote enthusiastically about his scathing denunciations of Donald Trump—but because I really thought he should have brought the tour home to America. It wasn’t as much needed in Manchester and Milan as it was in Minneapolis and Washington, DC.

Well, it turns out Springsteen knew that too. And so he scheduled a fairly impromptu US tour on February 17 to run from March through May, Minneapolis to DC. And I was there, from Minneapolis to Madison Square Garden to what was supposed to be the final concert in Washington. (Because of sports-team schedules, he wound up rescheduling a Philadelphia show to be last.)

I almost chased him to Philly and then decided: Perfection is perfect. Leave it alone.

You can read a lot of concert coverage that tells you what Springsteen played; I’m going to tell you how it felt. (Music writer Caryn Rose does both here.)

I never tired of hearing Springsteen talk about the “racist, reckless, corrupt, incompetent, and treasonous” president at these US dates (He embellished his European descriptions as things got worse here.)

His Minneapolis show felt the most astonishing and devastating. Not least because people were crying all around me (I was crying contagious tears too). These were people who’d been on citizen protection alert for months already; who were bone tired from caring for their neighbors, but carrying on, standing for hours in that arena; who knew martyrs Renée Good and Alex Pretti personally, or who felt like they did after so much time in the fight together. Those folks felt so seen and so loved. And when we got “Purple Rain,” because Prince, the Beloved One, lived in that sacred city, we all felt blessed.

But the Washington, DC, show was almost as transcendent. The sky opened up when Springsteen played “Streets of Minneapolis,” and the rain poured for a full hour. I kept thinking of his “Jungleland” lyric, “barefoot girls…drinking warm beer in the soft summer rain.” This was crushing spring rain, in sandals, in dirt. But it was baptism, it was cleansing, it was healing. Hearing the ode to Minneapolis that Springsteen wrote alone, now played with the mighty band, in place of his first stripped-down acoustic version, was galvanizing.

There’s always a call and response in the song, when he says, “With our chants of ‘ICE OUT NOW,’” and waits for the crowd to join him, at least three times. We did this time. But we also took up the chant all by its lonesome, “ICE OUT NOW,” after the song ended. Bruce looked so happy. “Let........

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