"The pursuit of immortality? I'll chase that as hard and fast as the next guy": Why the world is seeing a lot of Bruce Springsteen

Bruce Springsteen onstage holding his guitar aloft and jumping — (Image credit: Rob DeMartin)

More than 16 years ago now, at the then relatively sprightly age of 59, Bruce Springsteen told me how “an oncoming train focuses the mind”. He was reflecting on his own getting older, and the gush of work he’d been driven to undertake of late. This was a checklist adding up to five new albums in as many years, and four full tours: two with the E Street Band, one with the Seeger Sessions Band and another solo for 2005’s Devils & Dust record. Having recently entered his 77th year, Springsteen has, if anything, redoubled his efforts, as if racing ever harder to fend off time’s relentless march. For just a while there, though, there were cracks showing in the armour, and reason enough to question his judgement.

Earlier this year, Springsteen affirmed, “I’m old. I don’t give a fuck what I do anymore. As you get older, you feel a lot freer.” That much seemed apparent at the outset of the Land Of Hopes And Dreams tour, the sprawling endeavour begun by Springsteen and the E Street Band on February 1, 2023 in Tampa, Florida and ending 129 shows later in Milan, Italy on July 3 this year. In the first year of the tour, 29 shows had to be postponed. First off, Springsteen was struck down with a peptic ulcer. Then he and various E Streeters went down with covid. Far more damaging to Springsteen’s blue-collar branding was the controversy surrounding the tour’s high ticket pricing.

Springsteen, of all artists, the one who’d held fast throughout his touring life to a fixed mantra, ‘No one gets left behind,’ had allowed himself to be at the caprice of Ticketmaster’s noxious ‘dynamic pricing’ model.

When the initial run of shows went on sale in the US, the cost of tickets soared. Across its print and online iterations, Backstreets, the Springsteen fan bible since 1980, documented tales from scores of fans left behind by the price hikes. When the tour kicked off in February, Backstreets itself seemingly gave up on Springsteen. Announcing the shuttering of its editorial operations, publisher Christopher Phillips concluded bluntly: “We’d reached the end of an era.”

For his part, Springsteen was unrepentant. To the Asbury Free Press, he deferred: “I can set the price of my tickets. I can’t set the value… That money gets sucked up by the ticket brokers. I said: ‘Hey, let’s have the money go to the guys who are sweating up on stage for three hours.’ If that’s controversial for you, I don’t know what to say.”

There was not much disputing his basic logic, but how it looked made it a tougher sell. As the tour went into its second summer, Forbes calculated Springsteen’s personal wealth at $1.1 billion. This was the prevailing wind billowing in behind him and the E Street Band when they arrived in the UK in late spring this year to begin the third and final leg of the tour. It got blown away on the evening of Tuesday May 14 at Manchester’s Co-Op Arena.

The E Street Band studio portrait — The E Street Band (Image credit: Danny Clinch)

Backstage before the Manchester show, Springsteen warned his bandmates that things “might get heavy” that opening night. Out under the lights, prior to a note of music, he told the sell-out audience: “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.”

So he continued. Prefacing the tour’s title song with a rousing call to “all who believe in democracy and the best of our American experiment to rise with us, raise your voices against authoritarianism and let freedom ring!” Baldly declaring before My City of Ruins: “A majority of our elected representatives have failed to protect the American people from the abuses of an unfit president and a rogue government.” As if, with something, and someone to rail against, to have re-inflamed his lifelong passions, he was made whole once more, back on a firm footing.

By any measure, it was strong stuff, and made all the more impactful by the hard-driving power of the E Street Band that night, and most every night of what amounted to a 16-date victory lap. The shows’ running times may have got somewhat more compacted, on average just under the three-hour threshold they’d habitually barnstormed over in the past, but the “booty-shaking, lovemaking, Viagra-taking, history-making E Street Band”, as the Boss himself framed them, made a point loud and clear. They are still a compelling force of nature. An enduring draw, too. The tour has proved to be the highest-grossing of their starred togetherness, beating out even the blockbuster run accompanying 1984’s Born In The USA album.

Of course, the substance of Springsteen’s words in Manchester didn’t pass unnoticed, or unremarked upon by the current occupant of the White House. Indeed, Donald Trump’s response was almost instantaneous and predictably sour. Springsteen, Trump decreed via his own Truth Social platform, was “highly overrated… not a talented guy – just a pushy, obnoxious JERK… [and] dumb as a rock”. Armour very much intact, Springsteen swatted away Trump’s barbs as nothing more than a bothersome insect, telling Time magazine in September: “I absolutely couldn’t care less what he thinks about me.”

Like he said, he doesn’t give a fuck anymore. Yet he so clearly does, most especially in regard to curating and preserving his own legacy. If there was a running theme to Springsteen’s 2025, this was it. When he’d been forced off the road by the covid pandemic, locked down at his home in Colts Neck, New Jersey, Springsteen used the time to complete all of the unfinished material he had in his vault. A great motherlode of unreleased, mostly unheard songs that span the entirety of his career. The first fruit of his endeavour was released in June in the form of the Tracks II box set, and it was a gargantuan enterprise. While the original Tracks box of 1998 had brought 66 songs into the light, this belated sequel comprises 83.

Bruce Springsteen posing on a sofa with a guitar — (Image credit: Danny Clinch)

Tracks II’s revelation lay in the fact of these songs being organised into seven stand-alone albums. “Full records,” as Springsteen qualified, “some of them to the point of even being mixed and not released.”

What’s more, the material on three of the discs, titled Streets Of Philadelphia Sessions, Inyo, and Somewhere North of Nashville, dates back to the 1990s, long presumed to have been something of a lost decade for Springsteen, an uncertain period when he mothballed the E Street Band, relocated to California with his wife Patti Scialfa to raise their young family, and was otherwise perceived to have been mired in creative self-doubt. On the contrary, it transpires, he was busy all along and ever reaching.

Altogether, on Streets Of Philadelphia Sessions he quested to the same drum loops and synths backdrop he’d put up for his near-title song to Philadelphia, Tom Hanks’s Oscar-winning film of 1993. Mostly, on these tracks he ruminated on fracturing human relationships, their tone sombre, his mood pensive and brooding. Too dark of a record, he determined at the time, for him to put out.

Inyo and Somewhere North Of Nashville, meanwhile, range from 1995 to 1996. The former is a collection of songs Springsteen wrote after solo shows on his The Ghost Of Tom Joad tour, alone in hotel rooms in the dead of night. Hushed ruminations covering the same Sun Belt border town milieu as the Joad record. The latter revolves around freewheeling country and rockabilly tunes, put down on those California nights following the afternoon sessions for Joad.

Tracks II’s sheer weight of output is staggering enough. More so the consistently high level of quality control in operation, and then again, the fresh perspectives these songs add to Springsteen’s creative life. Witness two more of Tracks II discs, Twilight Hours and Perfect World, each recorded with longtime producer Ron Aiello. One is a companion piece to Springsteen’s 2019 solo album Western Stars, and an even deeper dive into an ornate American pop tradition, the other is loaded with propulsive rockers and contributions from various E Streeters. The magic of it all, as a glowing review on Pitchfork noted, “is in how intuitively these outliers stand among the classics”.

Bruce Springsteen sitting on a stool — (Image credit: David Michael Kennedy)

A mere four months on from Tracks II, Springsteen revisited his most singular classic, Nebraska. Nebraska ’82: Expanded Edition, a five-disc box, comprises a remastered version of the original album, plus outtakes, a newly shot performance film and, of most interest by far to diehard fans, the fabled ‘electric sessions’, songs he’d re-recorded with the E Street Band and either junked in favour of his own homemade recordings or gone back to for Born In The USA. In this case, there was nothing nearly so revelatory. The remastering spruced up Nebraska’s sonics, but now, and as then, its ageless potency is derived from the intimacy of hearing Springsteen grasp for truth and meaning, and a light out of his own personal black.

Instinctively, Springsteen knew as much himself all along. Nebraska was a one-off deal, a singular drama the sessions with the E Street Band couldn’t ever match, never mind surpass.

It’s such a storied slice of his history, they made a film of it. Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere, directed by Scott Cooper, who’d steered Jeff Bridges as a booze-sodden troubadour through another Oscar-winner, Crazy Heart, in 2009, and with The Bear’s leading man Jeremy Allen White in the title role, opened in cinemas hot on the heels of the box set, just as intent on burnishing Nebraska’s myth, and, in striving to show more, also amounting to less.

Even with Springsteen out banging a drum for it, teamed with Allen White on the chat show circuit, the film suffered the fate of most rock biopics, failing to spark both at the box office and with critics. An $8.8 million return on its crucial opening weekend in the US was much less than half of what horror cartoon Chainsaw Man – The Movie: Rezer Arc took, and that dropped 57 per cent the weekend after. The film was summed up ably by The Guardian’s chief film critic Peter Bradshaw as a “derivative, if well-intentioned, piece of fan fiction”.

Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere does at least serve to reinforce one absolute truth. As an act of imitation, Allen White’s is in many ways an extraordinary performance. Physically, and while not looking like him, he manages to have down pat so many of Springsteen’s mannerisms and facial tics. Vocally, he approximates Springsteen’s singing voice to the point of its roaring pitch, and with the precise same rasp at the edges. What he can’t possibly pull off is actually ‘being’ Bruce Springsteen. That defining sense of otherness doesn’t come with practice, isn’t available off the peg. Impressively, Allen White sings Born To Run in the movie like he’s trained to it. He’s eerily accurate, but for the blood, guts and soul.

Jeremy Allen White and Bruce Springsteen attend the UK Premiere of 20th Century Studios' &quot;Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere&quot; during the 69th BFI London Film Festival at Royal Festival Hal on October 15, 2025 in London, England — Jeremy Allen White and Bruce Springsteen at the UK Premiere of *Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere* at Royal Festival Hal on October 15, 2025 in London, England (Image credit: Tim P. Whitby/Getty Images for The Walt Disney Company Limited)

In that much, Allen White is far from being alone. Pulling his stadium-filling Quittin’ Time tour into New Jersey back in July, Zach Bryan, upon whom Springsteen has bestowed his benediction, paid his own tribute to Nebraska’s ragged glory. Towards the end of a rapturously received set at MetLife Stadium, Bryan introduced first Caleb Followill of Kings Of Leon to a baying East Rutherford crowd, and then “one of the greatest men ever to exist, a New Jersey native, Mr Bruce Springsteen!”

Together they navigated Atlantic City, Nebraska’s signature song. Bryan and Followill sang their lines like wide-eyed apprentices. Springsteen, as ever, rendered his as gospel, eyes squeezed shut, utterly given over to his testimony. Upon his last ‘meet me tonight in Atlantic City’, the roar of the crowd rose to a sustained crescendo. The meaning of it was easy enough to decode. Bryan and doubtless others will go on in Springsteen’s footsteps. Filling them is a whole other matter.

Then again, Springsteen himself shows no outward signs of slowing down, much less vacating the stage. He’s already promised a third instalment of Tracks within the next three years. Sooner than that there’ll be a new solo album, completed and ready to be released this year. As for playing again with the E Street Band, he told Rolling Stone last June: “I’m looking forward to doing a good deal of it in the future. But that future is finite.”

What else the future might hold in store for him is largely unknowable. Besides what Springsteen wants it to add up to. Back to what he shared with me in 2009. “The pursuit of immortality?” he considered. “I’ll chase that as hard and fast as the next guy.”

This one last chance power drive is ongoing.

Paul Rees been a professional writer and journalist for more than 20 years. He was Editor-in-Chief of the music magazines Q and Kerrang! for a total of 13 years and during that period interviewed everyone from Sir Paul McCartney, Madonna and Bruce Springsteen to Noel Gallagher, Adele and Take That. His work has also been published in the Sunday Times, the Telegraph, the Independent, the Evening Standard, the Sunday Express, Classic Rock, Outdoor Fitness, When Saturday Comes and a range of international periodicals.

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