Bruce Springsteen kicked off his 2025 Land of Hope and Dreams European tour Wednesday night at Co-op Live in Manchester, England, by delivering a fiery speech that railed against Donald Trump.
“The mighty E Street Band is here tonight to call upon the righteous power of art, of music, of rock and roll, in dangerous times,” he told the crowd right after walking onto the stage. “In my home, the America I love, the America I’ve written about, and has been a beacon of hope and liberty for 250 years, is currently in the hands of a corrupt, incompetent, and treasonous administration. Tonight, we ask all who believe in democracy and the best of our American experience to rise with us, raise your voices against the authoritarianism, and let freedom ring. This is ‘Land of Hope and Dreams.”
Springsteen is a passionate liberal who has campaigned for every Democratic candidate for president over the past two decades, and he’s made no effort to disguise his contempt for Present Trump, but this is his most passionate denunciation of him to date.
Hammering the point home, he followed up “Land of Hope and Dreams” with “Death to My Hometown,” a politically-charged song from his 2012 LP Wrecking Ball about how rapacious corporate greed conributed to the Great Recession of 2007/08.
A bit later in the show, he performed “Rainmaker” from the 2020 album Letter to You for the first time in a concert setting. The song is a cautionary tale about how demagogues exploit desperate people by offering easy answers to their problems. “Rainmaker says white’s black and black’s white,” Springsteen sings. “Says night’s day and day’s night/Says close your eyes and go to sleep now/I’m in a burnin’ field unloadin’ buckshot into low clouds.”
The theme of economic desperation and dislocation continued later in the show with “My Hometown” (“Now Main Street’s whitewashed windows/And vacant stores”) and “Youngstown” (“Now the yards just scrap and rubble/He said, ‘Them big boys did what Hitler couldn’t do,’”).
Prior to “My City of Ruins,” Springsteen paused to deliver another speech about the state of America. “There’s some very weird, strange, and dangerous shit going on out there,” he said. “In America, they are persecuting people for using their right to free speech and voicing their dissent. This is happening now. In America, the richest men are taking satisfaction in abandoning the world’s poorest children to sickness and death. This is happening now.”
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He continued: “And in my country, they are taking sadistic pleasure in the pain that they inflict on loyal American workers, they are rolling back historic civil rights legislation that led to a more just and moral society. They are abandoning our great allies and siding with dictators against those struggling for their freedom. They are defunding American universities that won’t bow down to their ideological demands. They are removing residents off American streets and without due process of law, are deporting them to foreign detention centers and prisons. This is all happening now.”
He concluded: “A majority of our elected representatives have failed to protect the American people from the abuses of an unfit president and a rogue government. They have no concern or idea for what it means to be deeply American. The America l’ve sung to you about for 50 years is real and regardless of its faults is a great country with a great people. So we’ll survive this moment. Now, I have hope, because I believe in the truth of what the great American writer James Baldwin said, he said, “In this world there isn’t as much humanity as one would like, but there’s enough.’ Let’s pray.”
This tour was initially seen as an additional leg of Springsteen and the E Street Band’s Letter To Run run, which kicked off in early 2023. But it was renamed The Land of Hope and Dreams tour earlier this month, and is clearly tilting in a more political direction now that Trump is back in the White House.
The back half of the show stuck largely to classics like “Badlands,” “Thunder Road,” “Born to Run” and “Bobby Jean.” But instead of wrapping like with “I’ll See You In My Dreams” like last time, he opted for Bob Dylan’s 1964 classic “Chimes of Freedom.” He hadn’t played it since the 1988 Amnesty International Human Rights Now! tour.
“Thank you Manchester for a beautiful night,” he hold the crowd. “I’m always a little nervous on that first night. It takes a little getting used to, even after all this time. Take this home with you.”
From Rolling Stone US
