Bruce Springsteen Opens ‘Land of Hope and Dreams” Tour: Concert Review

First of all, let’s dispense with some Bruce Springsteen mythology: It is a fallacy that all his concerts last three hours. Opening a fresh tour Tuesday night at the Target Center in Minneapolis, Springsteen and the E Street Band turned in a performance that lasted exactly 2 hours and 54 minutes, stem to stern, with no real encore break. Accuracy is important, right?

Here’s something else that’s accurate: You will probably never see a better rock ‘n’ roll show than the one that Springsteen and company gave to kick off the “Land of Hope and Dreams American Tour.” Unless maybe it’s one of the 19 remaining concerts on this relatively short run, which was conceived as something fairly close to an actual pop-up arena tour. At 76, Springsteen has lost virtually nothing, apart from a willingness to destroy his knees. What he’s gained is considerable, and isn’t measured in pure physicality,  although the pure endurance factor of still seeming in the prime of his performing life is awfully impressive. Minneapolis knew it was in good — no, great — hands early in Tuesday’s show when, singing “Darkness on the Edge of Town,” he stretched out the last occurence of the word tooooooooown into an elongated rasp as primal as any of the howls I’ve heard him do.

But what does darkness mean to Bruce Springsteen, in 2026? Well, as somebody once said, it’s the place where democracy dies. The “Land of Hope and Dreams” trek is being characterized as his first real “political” tour, which he hasn’t done anything to discourage, and which seems fair enough, even if the four topical speeches he gives over the course of the evening ultimately make up only a tiny bit of the (nearly) three hours. Yes, that’s right, four speeches — which are actually quite galvanizing, if you’re down for a few minutes of “Springsteen on Broadway Via the Atlantic” her and there. It’s not even just the content of what he’s saying (which, sure, it’s helpful to agree with, if you don’t want to be buting in your seat on this tour). It’s the way they form a connective tissue that helps reinforce the storytelling that he’s doing through his choice of catalog songs.

Not many veteran artists have what it takes to shape an entire set around a specific theme. Generally, they’d lack either the material or the moxie for that. It becomes all the more difficult if the subject matter the performer is focusing on is something that some factions in the audience might find challenging. Like: mortality, and malignant presidencies. Bruce Springsteen, bless him, has had his way with both now, in successive major tours. When he toured the world in 2024, his basic setlist and between-song chater leaned in hard on issues of loss, grief and the importance life takes on when you realize how finite it is. Only afterward did some attendees really get what he was up to there. For this 2026 outing, he’s being much more blatant about what it’s mostly all about: Maybe you saw the “No Kings” logo in the initial advertising. Most artists would be compelled, if they’re going to respond in current events in their art at all, to do a protest song. Springsteen did that with his recent anti-ICE single, “Streets of Minneapolis” (the reason for starting out this run in the Twin Cities). ut he’s also doing that rarest of things, so rare I can’t really think of another example among major contemporary artists: a protest tour.

It’s a flex, and surely seems like an unnecessary one to Springsteen’s many detractors on the MAGA side, who are chagrined — after all that “go woke, go broke” talk — to learn that 20,000 people a night welcome the chance to hear their favorite artist be as disturbed about the downfall of civility and empathy as they are. They will say that everyone attending these shows is suffering from “TDS.” But looking around the Target Center, where I saw a lot of Minnesotas relieved to be in the company of others who have felt as sad or chagrined as they have, I thought: Somehow, Trump Derangment Syndrome feels good in a place like this.

If anyone thought Springsteen would beat around the bush in getting to the point in these shows, they thought wrong. He didn’t even wait till the first song had commenced —a revisiting of his old cover of the 1970 Edwin Starr hit, “War” — before offering the night’s first speech, or invocation. “I want to begin the night with a prayer for our men and women in service overseas — we pray for their safe return. The mighty E Street Band is here tonight to call upon the righteous power of art, of music, of rock ‘n’ roll in dangerous times. We are here in celebration and defense of our American ideals, democracy, our Constitution, and our sacred American promise. The America I love, the America that I’ve written about for 50 years that’s been a beacon of hope and liberty around the world, is currently in the hands of a corrupt, incompetent, racist, reckless and treasonous administration. Tonight, we ask all of you to join with us in choosing hope over fear, democracy over authoritarianism, the rule of law over lawlessness, ethics over unbridled corruption, resistance over complacency, unity over division, and peace over…” A pause, and the band was struck up. “War! What is it good for?” A rousing opener, for starters… and an intro that alluded to the Iran “excursion” without outrightly mentioning it.

The Vietnam-era theme continued with the second number, “Born in the U.S.A.” Then E Street Band got Irish with anotheer everything’s-gone-to-shit anthem, the deceptively sprightly “Death to My Hometown,” a concert favorite since the “Wrecking Ball” era. Soon came a series of songs that don’t seem so socially conscious in origin, but can easily be made to read that way in a “political” set”: “No Surrender.” “The Promised Land.” “Darkness on the Edge of Town.” (“Everybody’s got a secret, Sonny” now sounded like it was about America’s collective underbelly, not some rando’s kink.) “Out in the Street” could be about folks marching out in the street for No Kings Day, if you used your imagination, or maybe just the celebration to be who we are in public without fear, which not every left-of-center is American is taking for granted forever anymore.

He rode that wave into a pick-me-up section of the show, knowing that his cautionary tour needs as many peaks as valleys in the setlist. It would hardly be an E Street show without joy, and lots of it. Much of that came in the small interchanges between the Boss and his band members, as if they were really rediscovering small delights on their first official night on duty. Springsteen seemed to be tickled, for some reason, by whatever Stevie Van Zandt was doing with his part of the customary call-and-response that always comes up at the end of “Out in the Street.”  And something about the way Nils Lofgren was playing the guitar intro to “Land of Hope and Dreams” caused Springsteen to giggle at length, for reasons unknown to the audience. Springsteen got a truly goofy grin on when he walked up on Max Weinberg’s riser to compel the drummer, who is not normally employed as a background vocalist, to sing lead on a few bars of “Hungry Heart.”

Message: Springsteen is pissed these days. But also, very playful… a good combo if you can get it in one impassioned package.

Gravity returned with the rust-belt-gone-wrong song “Youngstown,” the thunderous evocation of everyday violence in “Murder Incorporated,” and the first song Springsteen wrote about real-life police violence, “American Skin (41 Shots).” The latter number is so presciently akin to the new “Streets of Minneapolis” that it’s no wonder he placed them in different parts of the set, so as not to leave the audience wallowing too long in the abuse of authority at any one time, even if they’d make effective twins.

The album that might be Springsteen’s most truly political, “Magic,” got only one play in the night’s set, with “Long Walk Home,” introduced as “a prayer for our country.” Written in the Bush era, it suggests a limit to how aberrant American government policy could ever become: “Your flag flyin’ over the courthouse / Means certain things are set in stone / Who we are, what we’ll do and what we won’t” — a hope of restraint that now feels impossibly quaint. He let the band members take a break and entered solo acoustic mode for “House of a Thousand Guitars,” a “Letter to You” song that he didn’t get around to slipping into his setlists until last year in Europe. Like a lot of the more familiar Springsteen song brought onto this setlist, it’s a tune that manages to cover multiple subjects at once: the loss of an old friend, the eternal healing power of stacks of amps, and — written during the first Trump administration — the distress that a “criminal clown has stolen the throne.” (If he felt that was during the president’s calmer first term, no wonder Springsteen is going full-time with his dismay now.)

Rage Against the Machine veteran Tom Morello is a featured guitarist on the tour, as he was in the “Wrecking Ball” days — because the E Street Band needs four capable lead guitarists, not just three. As a bird of a feather when it comes to Bruce’s political leanings, but also as a confimed shredder, he brings further audience-pleasing fireworks to provide ensurance nothing ever feels funereal for long in this show. Some might argue that his magic tricks are a little too showy for the material; when he provides “The Ghost of Tom Joad” with duet parts on both lead vocals and guitar, it comes to feel a little like it’s the ghost of Steve Vai that is being summoned. But he’s a strong additional foil, in a band full of them, and earns the solo T-shirts that he has placed in the merch booth.

“Tom Joad,” as a period piece, didn’t put a name to the men and women who might’ve been responsible for migrant workers’ plight. In 2026, Springsteen names names, and not only Trump’s. “Our Justice Department has completely abdicated its independence,” he said during the lengthiest speec of the night, “and our attorney general, Pam Bondi, takes her marching orders straight from a corrupt White House. She prosecutes our president’s perceived enemies, covers up for his misdeeds, and protects his powerful friends. … The richest men in America have abandoned the world’s poorest children through death and disease through their dismantling of USAID. … We are abandoning NATO and the world order that’s kept us safe and at global peace for 80 years. … We threaten our neighbors and our allies whose sons and daughters have fought alongside us in American wars with a predatory annexation of their lands. …. Our museums are being told to whitewash American history of any unpleasant or inconvenient facts, like the full history of the brutality of slavery. You want to talk about snowflakes? We have a president who can’t handle the truth.”

But it was a night that specifically kept coming back to Minnesota, and its revered citizens living and dead. “Her last words to the person who killed her, to the man who would take her life, she said, ‘That’s fine, dude, I’m not mad at you.’ I’m not mad — God bless her. Tonight, when you go home, hold your loved ones close, and tomorrow, do as Renée did: find a way to take aggressive, peaceful action to defend our country’s ideals. As the great civil rights leader John Lewis said, ‘Go out and get in some good trouble.’”

Good and Alex Pretti were not the last Minnesotans whose spirits were summoned. After saying the next number was “for the maestro,” Springsteen sang Prince’s “Purple Rain,” as he had in concert only a rare handful of times before. And tnen, after a “Tenth Avenue Freeze Out” that had Springsteen doing some exuberant, glad-handing ramp work, he settled down for a finale of Bob Dylan’s “Chimes of Freedom.”

The tour’s namesake, “Land of Hope and Dreams,” feels strong enough to end the show, as it once did a quarter-century ago. (Instead it merely serves as the finale to the main segment of the set, wherein the lights go dark for a few seconds while the band just remains on stage, too long in this game to go through any motions about a pretend encore, and with enough stamina to not need to go towel off after two and a half hours.) It’s one of the greatest secular-gospel songs ever written — the tune where Springsteen plays Jesus just long enough to tell us that we’re all whores and sinners on this bus — and it just gets better every year that it becomes even more of a delivery system for a climactic Max Weinberg drum solo that really does feel like a slice of heaven. Who wouldn’t want to get on board?

Well, 40-50% of the population, we’re told, by the naysayers who insist that Springsteen is losing half his audience with polarizing positions like the ones he’s expressing at greater and bolder length than ever in this show. Maybe the fans who were supposed to ditch him already left years or decades ago, and what’s left are the folks think advocating for empathy is a niche position. The houses remain full, as well as rocking, anyway; it’s a hell of a remnant. As the man says, we’re all going to need a good companion for this part of the ride; it’s heartening to be at a show where you feel like you’re surrounded by 20,000 candidates for the position.

Setlist for Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band at Target Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota, March 31, 2026:

War
Born in the U.S.A.
Death to My Hometown
No Surrender
Darkness on the Edge of Town
Streets of Minneapolis
The Promised Land
Out in the Street
Hungry Heart
Youngstown
Murder Incorporated
American Skin (41 Shots)
Long Walk Home
House of a Thousand Guitars
My City of Ruins
Because the Night
Wrecking Ball
The Rising
The Ghost of Tom Joad
Badlands
Land of Hope and Dreams
Born to Run
Bobby Jean
Dancing in the Dark
Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out
Purple Rain
Chimes of Freedom