Showtime! Concert #11-Barcelona, Spain and Setlist
Thursday, June 20, 2024 Entry #86
When I would forget for a moment the novelty of all of this happening in Spain, it felt just like another magnificent performance by Bruce Springsteen and his E Street Band, something I have fortunately gotten quite used to. Springsteen carried on with his 2024 practice of loosening up the previous year’s setlist, and he introduced more songs rarely or never played in 2023. One of those was “Power of Prayer,” from Letter To You, Springsteen’s most recent recording with the E Street Band. Springsteen’s desire to “air out” in performance some of that newer music, much of it written about his current wrestling over how vitality can co-exist with mortality, was one of the impetuses for this post-COVID world tour. For a devotee of non-sectarian and secular, but still spiritual rock songs, hearing “Power of Prayer” live for the very first time was a treat for me.
Of course, Springsteen most often reached back into his vast fifty-year-old catalogue for song choices, and I got to hear one of the songs I had most been waiting for, “The River.” This is one of Springsteen’s most tender and plaintive story songs, with searing lines like “Is a dream a lie if it don’t come true, or is it something worse?” Hearing Springsteen sing “The River” accompanied by Steven Van Zandt gently strumming an acoustic guitar easily brought tears to my eyes, as it was one of the songs that started me on this path some 45 years ago. This video snippet I took of “The River” again shows the reverence that the Barcelona audience has for Springsteen, with everyone lighting up the night with their phone flashlights (there was even an old-fashioned lighter or two), and their soaring voices.
I find it interesting that going back decades, Springsteen rarely performs his iconic 1984 hit “Born In The USA” in the actual United States, but he almost always plays the song in his overseas concerts. I am sure a big part of the reason for this is Springsteen’s longstanding feeling that the song was misunderstood and misappropriated when it first came out by many Americans, including then-President Reagan, who gave it a false jingoistic meaning. It is true that the pumped up chorus grabs most of the attention, and in isolation it would sound patriotic without qualification. However, the verses are actually about Vietnam veterans coming home to a country that often disregarded and mistreated them. In this context, the refrain of “born in the USA” is really a frustrated, angry, and loud insistence to their government that they exist and deserve dignity. Perhaps Springsteen believes that European audiences are better able to treat this material with more nuance and perspective than those in his home country. In any event, Springsteen played the song tonight, my first time hearing it in the eleven shows I have attended on this tour (all but this one in the States). At about 1:06 into the video, you’ll notice I panned to that fantastic full moon that lent the song even greater majesty on this special night (see Entry #85).
It was really awesome sharing the Springsteen experience with Amy. She got a kick of taking a selfie video of the two of us singing along to “My Hometown” (another song Springsteen performed that I hadn’t yet heard on this tour, man there were a lot of those tonight!). I couldn’t help but reflect during that song that a little more than a year ago I had the good fortune of visiting Freehold, New Jersey, the “hometown” at the heart of the song. In the second video, Amy couldn’t resist swinging the camera toward my gleeful face while recording “Thunder Road.”
Seeing Springsteen in Spain, especially outdoors on a perfect summer night alongside my wife, was truly a remarkable and unforgettable experience.
As few postscripts:
1) Turns out today was E Street guitarist’s Nils Lofgren’s birthday. His wife posted a sweet message about how his birthday wish this year was to still be onstage with Bruce past midnight (good thing the guys in the band are all on the same page as their Boss, most of them in their 70’s, and still playing 3 hour shows, playfully exclaiming during the encores that they NEVER want to go home!). According to the official concert statistics, Springsteen and the E Street Band finished their last song of the night in Barcelona at 12:15 AM, so happy birthday, Nils Lofgren!
2) Though Amy and I moved on to another part of Spain the morning after the show, Springsteen stayed in Barcelona for a few more days. He played one more concert here, his fifth show in Spain in ten days. As you can see in the following social media post, our late night jaunt to Springsteen’s hotel (see Entry #84) was not entirely a pie-in-the-sky effort, as clearly Springsteen did interact with with fans lucky enough to see him out and about in Barcelona. We just had lousy timing!
Here is the setlist for tonight’s show, and that’s all for me reporting from beautiful Spain. See you next post where I’ll be back writing about seeing Bruce Springsteen in Southern California.
