(New Jersey, 1949) began on Wednesday in Manchester a new European tour loading from the start against. About a year ago Springsteen had to cancel a series of concerts for health problems and, at the outset, this new tour should take it to the cities where she could not play. But since then until now the political situation has changed radically in the United States and the author of has decided that his shows They are also acts of political protest. The 21 and 24 will play in San Sebastián.
From the start in Manchester – with Land of Hope and Dreams– until the last bis – his version of Chimes of Freedom by Bod Dylan – a good part of the repertoire and the presentations of some of the songs were explicit criticism of President Trump and alerts about the current drift of American politics. He even baptized the tour like Land of Hope and Dreams (The land of hope and dreams), an elegy to the values of American democracy and that in its day sang at the investiture ceremony of Joe Biden as president.
Before starting to sing, Springsteen made clear what his vision of the situation that his country is going through. “My home, the United States that I love, the United States on which I have written and has been a lighthouse of hope and freedom for 250 years, is currently in the hands of a corrupt, incompetent and traitorous administration.” After this diagnosis, he expressed his willingness that the concert also had a political significance. “Tonight, we ask all those who believe in democracy and in the best of our American experience to lift us, they raise their voices against authoritarianism and let freedom sound.”
Springsteen’s commitment to Democratic candidates has been a constant. In 2004 he was one of the drivers of the tour Vote for change that supported John Kerry, met during the 2008 election campaign and established friendship with the president (they recorded together a podcast and Obama attended one of his concerts in Barcelona) and in the last electoral campaign he publicly supported.
It is no accident that, after Land of Hope and Dreamsrecover an uncommon piece in your repertoire: Death To My Hometown. That letter about those who devastate their country has a very clear verse: “sends unscrupulous tyrants direct to hell.” “Our beloved leader” dedicated a song that he had never touched live: Rainmaker of the album Letter to Yor (2020). It is a piece of biblical imaginary about a town that suffers drought and people, desperate, needs to believe in a miracle and the rain maker that comes deceives them with false promises. In addition to classic successes, during the concert he also played other songs about the cross of the American dream that is one of the central affairs of his work: My Hometown o Youngstown.
Although he had composed it before the 11-S attacks of 2001, one of Springsteen’s songs associated with that moment is My City in Ruins. In Manchester he recovered it and, during the interpretation, sitting on stage and with his hand on his forehead, he said that in his country weird and dangerous things were happening and exemplified it with these words: “They are chasing people for using their right to freedom of expression and expressing their dissent. This is happening now. In the United States, the richest men are pleased to abandon the poorest children of the world to the world.
After the Energy Traca de Bises, traced to that of his concerts of the 2023 and 2024 tour, he finished with another piece that had not interpreted many years: his classic version Chimes of Freedom of Bob Dylan. If he sang it in his mythical concert of 1988 in the Eastern Berlin and after a few months he closed the mythical global tour of Amnesty International in which he acted with other colossi (Tracy Chapman, Peter Gabriel and Sting), he has now decided to recover it to look and listen again to the bells of Freedom.
