Apr 1, 2026 2:27pm PT

Bruce Springsteen Isn’t Just Doing Protest Songs — With His ‘Land of Hope and Dreams’ Trek, He’s Embarked on a Whole Protest Tour: Concert Review

Springsteen's opening night show in Minnesota felt like a reinvention of the way a concert can be shaped to tell a story, even if it's a story about how awful American politics have become.

Chris Willman

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Chris Willman

Senior Music Writer and Chief Music Critic

ChrisWillman

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First of all, let’s dispense with some Bruce Springsteen mythology: It is a fallacy that all his concerts last three hours. Opening a fresh tour Tuesday night at the Target Center in Minneapolis, Springsteen and the E Street Band turned in a performance that lasted exactly 2 hours and 54 minutes, stem to stern, with no real encore break. Accuracy is important, right?

Here’s something else that’s accurate: You will probably never see a better rock ‘n’ roll show than the one that Springsteen and company gave to kick off the “Land of Hope and Dreams American Tour.” Unless maybe it’s one of the 19 remaining concerts on this relatively short run, which was conceived as something fairly close to an actual pop-up arena tour. At 76, Springsteen has lost virtually nothing, apart from a willingness to destroy his knees. What he’s gained is considerable, and isn’t measured in pure physicality, although the pure endurance factor of still seeming in the prime of his performing life is awfully impressive. Minneapolis knew it was in good — no, great — hands early in Tuesday’s show when, singing “Darkness on the Edge of Town,” he stretched out the last occurence of the word tooooooooown into an elongated rasp as primal as any of the howls I’ve heard him do.

Bruce Springsteen Isn't Just Doing Protest Songs — With His 'Land of Hope and Dreams' Trek, He's Embarked on a Whole Protest Tour: Concert Review