An updated rendition of “Darkness on the Edge of Town” and the debut of “Spirit in the Night” sets the second show apart, but you can’t please all of the people all the time as some deranged critics are claiming the Boss needs lessons from Taylor Swift, who should be so lucky playing at this level four decades from now.
Bruce Springsteen will be 74 years old in less than three weeks. He recently sold his song catalog for well over $500 million, on top of an existing net worth measured in the hundreds of millions. He could have been anywhere in the world Labor Day weekend, doing whatever he wanted with whomever he wanted up to and including former Presidents and legendary filmmakers. Likewise, few in the world would begrudge him a well earned respite or even a placid retirement counting his almost incomparable accomplishments – Grammy’s, Academy Awards, Medals of Freedom, even his own designated state holiday). Instead, he chose to spend the holiday weekend pushing himself and his equally elderly E Street Band to the absolute limits of their musical and physical abilities in a series of three shows at MetLife Stadium on their home turf in New Jersey. The world-famous Meadowlands has been the site of many an epic Springsteen performance including one celebrating his 63rd birthday that ran until almost two in the morning after a thunderstorm delayed the start. His mom appeared on stage that time to honor the occasion. To be sure, this is not the Springsteen of ten years ago. He is visibly older, for age takes its toll on all of us and the only other option is death. Unavoidably, this tour has been accompanied by the bitter sweet reality that we might be nearing the end of an unparalleled fifty year run of epic performances. At the same time, this does not mean the Boss no longer puts on a proper show or shows any evidence at all he’s ready to put down the guitar for good. The set list still numbers close to thirty songs, the duration still touches three hours, and the goofy playfulness of a group of men and women having far more fun than anyone in this life or the next has a right to remain the same. All these years later, each of them still plays as though there was something left to prove, if only that they can still do it at this point.
The overall concert scene has changed dramatically during this period as well. Even setting aside the ridiculous ticket prices, intrusive security, and incredibly expensive beers, the internet catalogs every song an artist plays, night by night, compiling statistics, noting changes and tour premiers, up to and including what a band plays at the soundcheck. With precious few exceptions, gone are the days when you arrive at a show with no idea what songs are coming or what kind of performance to expect. Preconceived notions are almost impossible to escape, creating a new level of expectation and the potential for disappointment that things don’t change more dramatically from night to night, that you’ve seen the same show as everyone else in every other city. A celebrity of Springsteen’s prominence is also subject to endless reviews and commentary, every show dissected as if its intention was as an immortal work of art rather than a moment’s entertainment, a Hamlet to be analyzed in depth or Mona Lisa to be pondered for hundreds of years. According to NJ.com, Springsteen’s first show of the three night stand, Wednesday August 30, didn’t measure up to expectations. They summed up the performance as mere “cookie cutter thrills,” claiming “New Jersey fans deserve better.” “Wednesday’s show was tinged with moments of electricity but leagues less memorable than past MetLife visits,” the author Bobby Olivier expressed his disappointment. I am not immune to this criticism myself. For me, the Friday evening concert would be my third Springsteen show this year, having already seen him at Madison Square Garden in New York City and the La Defense Arena in Paris. There was certainly the potential for a similar reaction, especially reading all the setlists and being all too keenly aware this tour has not been as spontaneous as some in the past. For a man who used to take requests via sign from the audience, literally improvising large chunks of his performances, the current set list has seemed like something close to a straight jacket at times.
Previously, the Madison Square Garden stand featured only one new song compared to the rest of the tour, an epic “Jungleland” for the city after which it was written and one that sounded so good it might have been recorded forty years ago if you closed your eyes and ignored the slight stoop in the shoulders of all the performers. The show in Paris swapped out a mere three from there, adding a sublimely subdued “Mary’s Place,” a heart pounding “Born in the USA,” and the evergreen “Bobby Jean.” Since then, he’s mixed a few in and out – “My Love Will Not Let You Down” and “Death to My Hometown” serving as openers until “Lonesome Day” and “Night” recently took over at least for the past four shows. Previous tours, however, would have doubled, tripled, or even quadrupled these differences as five to seven songs regularly changed night to night. No one is quite sure why changes between shows have been reduced so dramatically, except it likely has something to do with the band’s age. The E Street Band itself has grown substantially over the years, adding a horn section and a back up drummer. The set list takes advantage of those additions by providing periods where the older members of the band can take a short, well-deserved break. Max Weinberg still might be mighty, but it can’t be easy pounding the drums for three hours at 72 years old. Springsteen himself doesn’t leave the stage, but even he slows down for an acoustic song and a little speechifying. The alternative would be a shorter overall show, and that simply wouldn’t be Springsteen. There is also the reality that Springsteen has always had portions of the set list that never change, moments that are performed night after night, sometimes over the course of decades. The house lights will come on during “Born to Run” no matter how many times he’s done it before. Certain songs, for whatever reason, will always get played. The rigidity on this tour is therefore a difference of degree, not kind. There is less variation than earlier combined with more scrutiny, resulting in the sense you might see two identical Springsteen shows, mere carbon copies of one another.
Fortunately, Springsteen himself thoroughly demolished this notion by the sixth song of the evening, an updated rendition of the 1978 classic, “Darkness on the Edge of Town.” Darkness itself is a song that has appeared regularly on tour since its release, both with and without the E Street Band. A classic slow burn with a pounding, methodical guitar riff barely held in check, it’s not quite a ballad, but not quite a rocker either, combining a slower, piano driven verse with a surging chorus, gritty with the defiance of Springsteen’s signature growl. Ostensibly, it’s a song about an old relationship that has gone south for an unknown reason. Life has gone on in the interim, different and the same, “They’re still racing out at the Trestles, but that blood it never burned in her veins.” The speaker “hears” she’s got a nice house up in Fairview and a “style she’s trying to maintain.” We get the sense that he still has feelings for her after all this time, but a good life is simply something he cannot offer under any circumstances. Regardless, “If she wants to see me, You can tell her that I’m easily found, Tell her there’s a spot out ‘neath Abram’s bridge, And tell her there’s a darkness on the edge of town.” Literally and figuratively, the song only gets darker from there as the focus turns from the lost relationship to a more generalized trauma and the desire to hide from it, things that are true of the speaker, his lost love, and humanity at large. This is a world where “everybody’s got a secret, Sonny, Something that they just can’t face.” What we do with this secret varies, “Some folks spend their whole lives trying to keep it, They carry it with them every step that they take.” Not everyone can handle the burden, however, and for some, they “let it drag ‘em down, Where no one asks any questions Or looks too long in your face, In the darkness on the edge of town, In the darkness on the edge of town.”
This darkness doesn’t really have a definition, but everyone knows what it is and perhaps has seen it for themselves. It’s the region of middle America specifically, the entire world more broadly, that David Lynch has explored for decades. The underbelly of our brighter aspirations, what’s left behind when you strip away the better angels of our nature. From there, Springsteen takes one step further down the universal path of the song and then one back, making it even more personal in the final verse. “Now some folks are born into a good life, And other folks get it anyway, anyhow, Well now I lost my money and I lost my wife, Them things don’t seem to matter much to me now.” Interestingly, we cannot say for sure if the speaker’s wife is the same woman addressed earlier in the song or someone that came along later, but it doesn’t really matter. He has lost either one or both (perhaps even others), along with his livelihood, but instead of looking back with regret, he takes it with a certain prideful defiance, believing none of it matters anymore because of the darkness that has grown inside him. Whatever happened in the past:
Tonight I’ll be on that hill ‘cause I can’t stop
I’ll be on that hill with everything I’ve got
Lives on the line where dreams are found and lost
I’ll be there on time and I’ll pay the cost
For wanting things that can only be found
In the darkness on the edge of town
Rarely does a final verse prompt so many questions while offering some universal truths. We’re simultaneously left wondering what drove the speaker down this path. Is he a drug addict? A degenerate gambler? A criminal? Some combination of all and more? We’re also unsure if he is merely rationalizing away his wasted existence, claiming he truly wants these dark things for whatever reason when he would prefer to be back with the woman he loves and the “style she’s trying to maintain.” Ironically considering how bleak this statement is, the speaker does not dismiss all hope, alluding to dreams and stating that they can be both found and lost in this darkness. We don’t truly believe he will find some new dream, but it hangs just slightly out of reach. Beneath the many questions, there lies some unchangeable truths about life, even our own selves. Each of us has choices to make about the people we want to be, the things we want out of life, and how we spend our time. These choices will be different from person to person, but everyone makes them in one way or another, some striving to better themselves, some simply treading water in a world where merely surviving is its own challenge, and others looking to lose themselves. For each of us, however, there will be a time and place when we must choose, where we must devote ourselves, and a cost that we will pay. The things we want might not be in the darkness on the edge of town, but they won’t come if we don’t show up and they certainly won’t be free.
Last Friday, Springsteen somehow made this song seem new and different, not an easy feat for a track approaching 50 years old and one he’s played over and over again, including acoustic versions. This time around he chose to transform the verse into something of a confessional. Rather than singing it outright, Springsteen spoke it point blank to the audience, as though he were sharing his sins with one of his past loves or even a priest. The underlying music was pared back, leaving us with that undulating rhythm threatening to spill over and explode into the chorus, heightening the tension between the two. The chorus arrived with a heartbreaking scream and a swell of music, as if the band and the audience were plunging into that darkness from which there is no escape, accentuating the core themes of the song. “Darkness on the Edge of Town” was not a song I’d expected, much less a revised approach, making it a highlight of the tour and one of those moments Springsteen manages to create time and again, even at retirement age. He wasn’t done yet either. A couple of songs later, he debuted the classic “Spirit of the Night” for the first time on the tour, this time in a traditional incarnation complete with asking the audience, “Can you hear the spirit?” before the music began. He would return to the normal set list for the next 14 songs, then diverge with a cover of “Seven Nights to Rock” by Moon Mullican, one which has made sporadic appearances on this and other tours.
Mr. Olivier from NJ.com was no more enthused than with the previous show, opining that Springsteen should be taking lessons from Taylor Swift, as in “Bruce’s tired act needs help – from Taylor Swift. “As I again stood inside MetLife Stadium Friday night, enduring largely the same, tired set Bruce Springsteen and The E Street Band also performed Wednesday night — as well as the last six months on this divisive 2023 international tour — I tried to retrain my focus.” Mr. Olivier’s complaint is a simple one. “Heading into Friday’s show, the band had only played 66 different songs across 64 concerts this tour, compared to 144 different tracks played through 75 shows on ‘The River’ anniversary tour in 2016-17.” Somehow, this led him to conclude that Springsteen needs a “secret songs” session. “On Swift’s world-beating Eras Tour, which commandeered MetLife for three nights back in May, the pop ultra-star played nearly the same set every single night, just like Bruce. But amid her three-and-a-half hour marathon — she’s now playing longer than Springsteen, who’da thunk — Swift built into her set a surprise or ‘secret songs’ session, of two solo acoustic numbers. This pair of songs was different every night throughout the sprawling tour, allowing fans to anticipate and covet the moments that would be singular to their show. With this (and almost zero repeats) Swift was able to touch nearly 100 additional songs in her swelling catalog and still visit all the hits of her main set every night without fan complaint.” Of course, playing 66 songs in 64 concerts when your set list is usually 25-28 songs, means that Springsteen has debuted an entire second concert and a third during this time. Numbers can be crunched one way or another, nor or many complaining save for Mr. Olivier, but here the number that matters is the four decades Springsteen has on Taylor Swift, who is a tender 33 years old. It should not be surprising to anyone that she possesses more energy and can perform for longer than a man more than double her age.
This is common sense, not a real critique. At that age, Springsteen was a bundle of unrestrained rock and roll, running all over the stage for hours on end, leaping onto the piano, sliding from one side of the stage to the other, and leaning back on his microphone stand until his head touched the floor. We might wish to witness that again, but wishes rarely come true in this life and designating a special 2-song section to appease critics isn’t going to change that. The benefit of Bruce’s current approach is that even diehard fans who have been to multiple shows still aren’t sure what might happen next. I didn’t have Darkness, Spirit, or “Seven Nights to Rock” on my list before the show. In the parking lot beforehand, we discussed what he would open with, and no one thought it would be “Lonesome Day” followed by “Night,” even though neither was new, they were new to us. Moreover, Springsteen retains his unique ability to bring people together. Two people flew in from Kansas City and Atlanta respectively to join us for the unique event that is Springsteen at the Meadowlands, a journey one of them described as “thirty years” in the making. Neither was disappointed, nor was anyone in our group. Last but not least, there is something to be said for perfection and, though I might have liked a slightly different take on the middle of the show, I challenge anyone to lay down a better seven closing tracks. The stretch between the brilliant “Backstreets” and “Thunder Road” has remained largely unchanged throughout the tour, but it manages to rock every single time as the show builds to its inevitable climax. Taylor Swift should be so lucky twenty years on, much less forty.
Confessions of a Conservative Atheist 
nice read
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