When Bruce Springsteen brought his “Land of Hope and Dreams Tour” to the Los Angeles area this week, it followed the same template as the opening night of the tour in Minneapolis exactly seven days prior. There was one addition to the setlist Tuesday, in the first of two Kia Forum shows: a cover of the Clash’s “Clampdown,” sung as a duet with Tom Morello. Inevitably, they drew big cheers when they got to the vintage Strummer-Jones line “In these days of evil presidentes…” Who knew that, 47 years later, Americans would be bashing kings with an even greater passion than the Brits of the original punk era?
It’s safe to say that most of the 18,000 in the audience were primed to roar for a line like that, given that this pop-up trek had been clearly advertised as a patriotic protest tour, in response to the ICE killings in Minneapolis and other recent outrages. Springsteen’s many detractors have repeatedly claimed that he will lose half his audience by publicly positioning himself against this administration, but he is still filling arenas this time around with those who know exactly what to expect and are coming as much to enjoy some social solidarity as to hear “Badlands.” Hardcore fans in Los Angeles had likely already heard or read the speeches that Springsteen gave in the earlier Minneapolis or Portland tour stops, which will be as faithfully rendered every night as the well-honed text of his “Springsteen on Broadway” run.
There were just a couple of slight changes in his on-stage patter Tuesday. One was removing Pam Bondi’s name when he was referring to the injustices of the Justice Department. (Yes, the attorney general had been fired in the short time between the tour’s first show and its third, even though that feels like it happened a month ago. Time flies, in Trump’s America.) The other was an ad lib Springsteen threw in during his final speech of the night, in which he sits down on the lip of the stage to share some closing dismay along with the promised hope and dreams.
He may have been influenced by the fact that this was the night in which the president was supposed to begin bombing Iran “back to the stone ages,” only to have the news come out not long before showtime that some kind of ceasefire was being put in place at the 11th hour. Springsteen began to recite his prepared text: “These are the hard times, but we’ll make it through. We’re gonna make it through,” he said. “We’re the Americans.” Then, just for a moment, he went off-script.
“What do they say? Americans do the right thing, after they’ve tried everything else.”
He gave a slight chuckle, then uttered: “Fuck.”
Beautifully prepared speechwriting is one thing, but sometimes an exasperated F-bomb also does the trick.
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The “Land of Hope and Dreams Tour” serves two masters: being a disappointed and angry howl against the extreme right turns the country has been taking… and the mission to also give the audience a walloping good time. Springsteen has sequenced his show in a way that deftly threads these two threads together: Whether you come to mourn blood shed on the “Streets of Minneapolis” or celebrate the personal liberation found in going “Out on the Street,” Springsteen has a lane of E Street set aside for you during these three hours.
Timothy Norris/Kia Forum
There were plenty of moments of silliness to go along with the solemnity in Tuesday’s show. He has tended to break the setlist up into blocks of music that are either personally joyful or culturally alarmed, with careful segues beween the two moods so that the juxtapositions never seem too abrupt or bizarre.
He has added one topical phrase to the fast-talking rap he does toward the end of “Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out,” reflecting the politicised theme of this tour but allowing himself to have a moment of fun with it. “I want you to go home tonight and wake up all your neighbours,” he demands, as is his longstanding custom when performing this 1975 favourite. “I want you to get them outta bed, and I want you to tell them that you’ve just seen the heart-stoppin’, pain-stompin’, pants-droppin’, earth-shockin’, hardest-rockin’, booty-shakin’, earth-quakin’, love-makin’, Viagra-takin’, history-makin’, ICE-outin’, soul-shakin’, legendary E Street Band!”
That, of course, was not the first time ICE came up in the course of the evening, as his late-January composition “Streets of Minneapolis” had him stopping to lead the crowd in the rallying cry of “ICE out now!” four times, where there was only one on the studio version. That song also had him dropping a fresh F-bomb not in the recorded lyrics: “It’s our blood and bones and these whistles and phones against Miller and Noem’s fucking lies.” (Unlike Pam Bondi, whose mention was dropped post-firing, Kristi Noem will be immortalised as a villain forever in the annals of Bruce-dom.)
The show started, as on the previous two nights, with a short speech that led right into his revived cover of Edwin Starr’s “War,” which segued right into “Born in the U.S.A.” — a Vietnam-themed double-header. From then on, much of the night was like a “Socially Conscious Springsteen Greatest Hits” collection, including “Death to My Hometown,” “My City of Ruins,” “Youngstown,” “The Ghost of Tom Joad,” “Murder Incorporated,” “Long Walk Home,” the Bob Dylan cover “Chimes of Freedom” and, of course, the sublime “Land of Hope and Dreams” itself. You could trace how certain themes have reemerged over the years, as with the tragic twinship of 2001’s lament about state-sanctioned murder, “41 Shots (American Skin),” and the new “Streets of Minneapolis.” In “Wrecking Ball,” he repeated the phrase “Hold tight to your anger” three times, for emphasis — and with “Clampdown” now in the set, that line served as an echo of the Clash’s maxim: “Let fury have the hour, anger can be power.”
But he is not about to stay mad, or lamentful, for a full two hours and 52 minutes. So after listing off all those heavier songs, it’s remarkable just how much of the set was still devoted to setting off the constant joy bombs the E Street Band has been known for for the last half-century. The current tour and the last one they did, two years ago, have very distinct, individualised themes: the 2024 show was about facing mortality, and the 2026 show is about facing America’s moral failures. But in both cases, the songs of jubilation stand not as outliers but as relevant reminders of why it ain’t no sin to be glad you’re alive, or, as the case may be, to be glad you’re American, current circumstances notwithstanding. It’s no exaggeration to say that both these tours have been designed as very deliberate and calculated affirmations of life… a description that would feel like hype or hyperbole if you said it of just about any other rock ‘n’ roll tour.
Timothy Norris/Kia Forum
This all kind of came together in what is, ironically, the show’s quietest and probably most obscure number. That is “House of a Thousand Guitars,” a song from the 2020 “Letter to You” album that Springsteen did not previously perform on tour. He does it now acoustically, while the band gets to take a pee break, something he does not afford himself during these epic proceedings. (Maybe his prostrate is stronger than the rest?) It’s a song with a reference that is bound to get a cheer on a “No Kings”-themed tour — “The criminal clown has stolen the throne / He steals what he can never own” — but, maybe even more importantly, it’s a testament to the power of music being stronger than either Donald or death. The show could not have a sweeter centrepiece.
And speaking of guitars, the E Street Band does seem to have about a thousand electric ones, now, even though it’s actually only four. Guest star Morello joins the already capable Nils Lofgren, Little Steven Van Zandt and Springsteen in peeling off multiple solos during the night. I tried to imagine whether it would be possible for a MAGA person to come and enjoy these concerts, with all the rhetoric about how that movement is proving to be America’s ruination. And in the end, this show is such a showcase for sequential guitar heroism that it might be possible to be a right-wing-extremist guitar nut and have a good time at the gig. (Let us know how that works out, if you fit that bill.) Springsteen’s own solos are shorter and tangier, but the other three guys all get truly epic solos: Lofgren on “Youngstown” and “The Rising,” Little Steven on “Murder Incorporated,” and Morello on “American Skin” and “Tom Joad,” for starters.
As time-honoured solos go, there is also Jake Clemons, recreating his uncle’s sax work (and prompting Bruce to do a truly goofy dance) in “Dancing in the Dark,” and Springsteen gleefully blowing his harmonica in “The Promised Land” like he is the twister that is going to blow everything down.
Some of the musical pleasures in the show feel age-old, like Roy Bittan’s piano licks and Max Weinberg’s furious fills. (A special call-out to how well the overhead video screens capture some of these moments, knowing exactly when, in this well-oiled machine, to switch to shots of Weinberg doing especially powerful fills in a number like “Murder Incorporated.”) Some of the moments to treasure are not so eternal and familiar. There may be a few old-fashioned fans who lament the long-gone days of the E Street Band being a smaller unit instead of the veritable orchestra that appears on stage now. But any such nostalgia would be misplaced when you get Bruce’s battery of backup singers forming a choir at the moving climax of “Long Walk Home”… which, by the way, ought to be considered as a new National Anthem, whenever the country gets around to regrouping from all this.
At the centre, there is Springsteen, with a world-weariness in his speeches that is in no way mirrored in his performance level, which would feel spirited and energised for a man of half his 76 years. It remains to be seen how many years he’ll be able to deliver as powerful a raspy belt as he does here, practically uninterrupted, for almost three hours; get it while you can.
There is something special about seeing Springsteen at the Forum, which has to nearly feel as much like a home base at this point as anywhere in home territory on the east coast. It’s not “the dump that jumps,” as he famously deemed the L.A. Sports Arena, but neither is it his famously hated Staples Center. Springsteen didn’t devote a lot of Tuesday’s show to catering to the local crowd, but he did have some quips. There were cheers for the New Jersey references in “Wrecking Ball” that led him to wonder aloud how many people in the audience were from the state. Naturally, a suspiciously big cheer went up, leading him to ask, “Then who the fuck is from Los Angeles?” Another big response. “Get out of here,” he said. “Nobody was born in Los Angeles.”
But most of his chatter during the night was about the larger issues that prompted the tour just a matter of weeks earlier.
“This White House is destroying the American idea and our reputation around the world,” he said, taking a seat at the lip of the stage as the night drew to a close. “To many, we are no longer looked upon as an often imperfect but strong defender of democracy, standing for the global good. We are no longer the land of the free and the home of the brave. We are now America, a reckless, unpredictable, predatory rogue nation. That is this administration and this president’s legacy. … Honestly, honour, humility, true compassion, thoughtfulness, morality, true strength and decency — don’t let anybody tell you that these things don’t matter anymore. They do.“
This last assertion got a spontaneous standing ovation from the vast majority of the Forum crowd, as if he’d just trotted out a greatest hit, which in a way he had.
“They’re at the heart of the kind of citizens we want to be and the kind of country we want to leave to our children,” he continued. “So many of our elected leaders have failed us that this American tragedy can only be stopped by the American people. So join us…”
Are these the words of a radical-left lunatic? Or your high school civics teacher, dressed up as a rock god to impart a lesson about basic decency? It’s such a fine line these days.
(For another account of the tour, read Variety’s review of the opening-night show in Minneapolis.)
Timothy Norris/Kia Forum
Setlist for Bruce Springsteen at the E Street Band at the Kia Forum in Inglewood, Calif., April 7, 2026:
War
Born in the U.S.A.
Death to My Hometown
Clampdown
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
Chimes of Freedom
From Variety US