Here you have it, this man in black singing "We made a promise we swore to always remember/ We don't retreat, baby, we don't give up." Dusk spills through the sky of Barcelona like black ink that falls into a glass, a glass half full or half empty, this is how Bruce Springsteen has always seen life and so he has told it in songs of euphoria but also of suffering, of celebration and resistance, songs of hopes and defeats, like those he has come to sing once again today.
That's right: Bruce Springsteen is 73 years old and he doesn't retire and he doesn't give up. So he says in the first song of his concert at the Lluís Companys stadium, with a hot and hard voice, a tense muscle that will accompany almost 60,000 people for a few hours of music. "Hello, Barcelona. Hello, Catalonia".
He recorded 'No Surrender' in 1984 as an oath and an engagement: as a promise. And here he is four decades later ready to take us beyond the party that is a concert, trying to explain something that is above the dense choruses and the four guitars intertwined with sailor knots, Steven Van Zandt with the soft 'flow', Nils Lofgren to blows.
Tonight, Bruce Springsteen does not come to say goodbye (or does he?), but he wants to remind us that he is already in the time of farewells, that his great rock catharsis is not endless and that, at his age, death is already a shadow that pursues him. That's what his album 'Letter to You' is about, published in 2020 and inspired by the death of his E Street Band bandmates Clarence Clemons and Danny Federici and a very old sidekick, the first of all, George Theiss, the boy who invited him to be part of his first group, when he was 15 years old.
Some of the songs on 'Letter to you' form the narrative pillar of the concert. 'Ghosts' and the title track enter the beginning of the sober show, songs gripped by clichés, but transcendent for their vitalistic celebration. "I'm alive and coming home," he sings enthusiastically, if somberly.
Jumping back and forth in time, with a resplendent sound, recent songs are linked without pause with old classics of the 70s such as 'Out in the Street' ("Oh-oh-oh!") and 'Candy's Room' in tough, precise and brutally forceful interpretations. Memorable. Some even turn 50 in 2023 like atomic and full of 'swing' 'Kitty's Back' and 'The E Street Shuffle': hilarious. Songs that aspired to eternity, to a pagan arcadia of night streets, dreams of redemption and promised lands at the end of the desert. Somehow, invoking them again with the hardened gaze of the survivor is an anticipated exercise in longing, it is as if he is missing his self of today, the self of this magnificent night.
That disheveled, defiant and hesitant kid of the 70s associated rock with youth, with its rebellion and independence, with an epic that posed the whole life as a continuous story of overcoming. Today, rock is identified with maturity and Springsteen has the same monthly followers on Spotify as, for example, Aitana, and a third as Rosalía. 'Prove it All NIght' or 'The Promised Land' are songs of mythological size and, although their celebration is pure nostalgia, what Springsteen is proving is that you don't have to be young to have that defiant and bold attitude.
That confrontation, the fantasies of youth versus the reflections of maturity, is a journey that can be well understood by his audience, who has grown, matured and aged with him. The stadium is dominated by listeners over 40, 50 years old, people who have probably seen Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band melting the cement of the stands, shaking the ground under their feet. The tickets for this concert and the one they will offer on Sunday in the same place, two nights that begin their European tour, were sold out 10 months ago in a quarter of an hour, some of them with very high prices, which caused a wave of protests on social networks.
It is the 52nd concert of the rocker from New Jersey in Spain, one of the countries he has visited the most times in his career. Number 20 in Barcelona, one of its adopted cities. And you can tell he's comfortable. He no longer throws himself to the ground or reaches trance or runs back and forth drenched in sweat, but he shows not a sign of decay. He has even brought some of his friends to enjoy the experience, very special friends: former US President Barack Obama and his wife, Michelle Obama, and film director Steven Spielberg and his wife, actress Kate Capshaw.
On that stage, the group reaches a score of musicians. The horn section pulls back, with two trumpets, trombone, baritone saxophone and that torrential tenor sax that is emblematic of the group and that in 2011 Jake Clemons inherited when his uncle Clarence died. In addition, four backup singers, a percussionist and musicians assimilated to the structure of the E Street Band such as violinist and guitarist Soozie Tyrell and accordionist and organist Charles Giordano.
That is, a hurricane. A passionate one. A bombing. A pedal pressed to the bottom. Choose the metaphor, it could be like this all night.
But it is a hurricane less devoured by urgency and intensity, with the songs a tad slower than years ago. In the architecture of his sound, the central pillar remains the drummer Max Weinberg, a discreet prodigy who provides the necessary texture at every moment, a human metronome who is the soul of the E Street Band and who, once again, listen to it well, maintains the sound firmer than the buttocks of a gymnast.
Springsteen played the longest concerts of his career on his previous tour with the E Street Band in 2016. The group finished the concerts visibly exhausted. Now it's another kind of marathon. He no longer wants to prove that he can be eternally young. Watch him now, singing solo with his acoustic guitar before 55,000 people in silence 'Last Man Standing'. It is, as he explains, his song about being the last survivor of the first group in which he was a kid: "I am the last man standing," he repeats the chorus.


  • Bruce Springsteen
  • Barcelona
  • Barack Obama
  • music

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