By Paul Robicheau

In Boston, the Boss fused crowd-pleasing anthems with a forceful anti-Trump jeremiad—raising questions even as he roused the faithful.

Bruce Springsteen on the Land of Hope and Dreams tour. Photo: Rob DeMartin

Bruce Springsteen’s crusade for the common man might cause some diehard fans to flinch, since it’s hard to get into his church for less than hundreds of dollars. But their New Jersey hero paid people back with a searing truth-to-power broadside against the Trump administration during Sunday’s near-three-hour show at TD Garden, mixing catalog-spanning protest songs with crowd-pleasing anthems.

Springsteen set the tone from the outset in a brief monologue that called out “a reckless, racist, incompetent, treasonous president,” continuing a more forceful stand than most celebrities or legislators. He asked the sold-out crowd to join in “choosing hope over fear, democracy over authoritarianism, the rule of law over lawlessness, ethics over unbridled corruption, resistance over complacency, truth over lies, unity over division, and peace over war.” That last word erupted into Edwin Starr’s 1970 hit “War,” with Springsteen backed by the orchestral power of an 18-piece E Street Band that included five horns, four backup singers, and guest guitarist Tom Morello. “What is it good for?” they sang. “Absolutely nothing.”

Springsteen’s booming “Born in the U.S.A.,” a 1984 hit about a troubled Vietnam vet misconstrued as a jingoistic anthem, and the Celtic march of “Death to My Hometown” (sax scion Jake Clemons wielding a stage-front bass drum) followed before the initial detonation was completed by the Clash’s “Clampdown.” Morello fueled that punk-era classic with bold chord swipes and leg kicks while trading verses with Springsteen, who bit into the lyric “In these days of evil presidentes.”

Nils Lofgren, Bruce Springsteen, Max Weinberg and Stevie Van Zandt at TD Garden. Photo: Paul Robicheau

But the set truly settled in with a stripped down, patiently ruminative “Darkness on the Edge of Town” (Springsteen holding resonant notes at age 76 while singing of “lives on the line where dreams are found and lost”) and struck the night’s indelible highpoint with “Streets of Minneapolis.” He wrote that song after the shooting deaths of protesters Renee Good and Alex Pretti at the hands of federal agents; it added contemporary verve and vigor that went beyond the show’s nostalgic element, even while the line “Here in our home, they killed and roamed, in the winter of ’26” sounded like a reflection on an injustice from a history book. And the singer altered a line about King Trump’s lieutenants to angrily note their “fuckin’ lies,” and spread the song’s call for “ICE out now” into chants from the crowd.

Of course, not every Springsteen fan in attendance was all in on the politics, so the singer used “The Promised Land” (with fans chiming “Blow away” to “the lies that leave you nothing but lost and brokenhearted”) as a bridge to a pair of old crowd favorites from 1980’s The River. “Two Hearts” found Springsteen sharing a mic, an affectionate head rub and air kisses to foil Stevie Van Zandt over Garry Tallent’s nimble bass line, while “Hungry Heart” sparked the usual hearty singalong where the Boss played to the rear seats, an off-theme palate cleanser for those inclined.

Clockwise: Soozie Tyrell, Lisa Lowell, Tom Morello, and Bruce Springsteen at TD Garden. Photo: Paul Robicheau

Then the tightly scripted set flipped back to three politically charged songs rarely played in recent years. Named for the Ohio Rust Belt city, “Youngstown” became a showcase for guitarist Nils Lofgren (who split the spotlight with Morello’s periodic turns), pushed by Max Weinberg’s drums as he delivered tapped flurries and bent-string sustains, ultimately breaking into a twirl that sent the scarf at the end of his guitar neck flying. The larger ensemble kicked into the full-bore thrust of the anti-violence “Murder Incorporated,” and “American Skin (41 Shots),” which recasts the 1999 police shooting of Amadou Diallo after he pulled out a wallet at a traffic stop. “Is it a gun? Is it a knife? Is this a wallet? This is your life,” Springsteen sang. “You can get killed just for living in your American skin.”

The 2020 track “House of a Thousand Guitars” worked better as a solo acoustic number than a band feature (and, in keeping with the Land of Hope and Dreams tour’s No Kings subtitle, incidentally included the lyric “The criminal clown has stolen the throne”) And before “My City of Ruins,” with its “Rise up” chorus and gospel tone lifted by the backup singers, Springsteen laid down an even deeper speech built around a recurring kicker: “This is happening now.”

He decried an “unjust, illegal” war, the Supreme Court gutting the Voting Rights Act, immigrants in detention without due process, a Justice Department covering up Trump’s “misdeeds” and protecting his friends, the dismantling of USAID (“This is no longer on the front page, but children die every day”), the undermining of NATO, museums whitewashing history such as slavery (“You want to talk about snowflakes? We have a president who can’t handle the truth”), and a $1.8 billion fund to reward people who assaulted police officers on Jan. 6.

“We still stood as a beacon for hope, liberty, and freedom around the world, an imperfect but strong defender of democracy,” Springsteen said. “To many now, we are America—the reckless, unpredictable, predatory, untrustworthy rogue nation.”

He called for honesty, honor, humility, character, integrity, truth, compassion, humanity, thoughtfulness, morality, true strength, and decency. “This American tragedy can only be stopped by the American people—you,” Springsteen said, imploring the audience to join the cause. “There is no one coming to save us. We’ve got to do it ourselves.”

E Street Band accomplices Charlie Giordano, Nils Lofgren, Tom Morello, and Jake Clemons with Bruce Springsteen at TD Garden. Photo: Paul Robicheau

From there, the home stretch resembled that of recent tours (including his 2023 stop at TD Garden), touching on familiar warhorses that began with “Because the Night” (which seemed a bit sluggish having to haul along the larger band), “Wrecking Ball” (with final refrain “Hard times come, and hard times go”) and “The Rising.” But the night’s other clear standout was Morello’s return for “The Ghost of Tom Joad,” squaring off with Springsteen in that tale of the disenfranchised, the Boss lending ringing harmonics on guitar before Morello took off on his own display of whammy-bar whines, fluid tendrils, and rubbed imitations of turntable scratching that recalled his work with Rage Against the Machine. A segue into “Badlands” was nearly anti-climactic, though that classic still summoned such pertinent lines as “Rich man wanna be king” and “I believe in the faith that could save me!”

The encore encompassed a dual-accordion, Irish-flavored “American Land” (with a shoutout to the Massachusetts Immigrant and Refugee Advocacy Coalition in the lobby), and house lights up for “Born to Run,” the lightweight “Dancing in the Dark” (though its lyrics are darker than people think and this version livelier than usual), and “Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out,” where Springsteen took a stroll into the crowd.

Before a final, hymn-like cover of Bob Dylan’s “Chimes of Freedom,” Springsteen thanked Boston for supporting his band since the early ’70s, urging fans to believe “that better days lie ahead” and share arguments with dignity. “Find a way to take aggressive peaceful action to defend our country’s ideals,” he said, “and do as the great civil rights leader John Lewis said: go out and get in some good trouble.”

On the eve of Memorial Day, Springsteen did just that.

Paul Robicheau served more than 20 years as contributing editor for music at the Improper Bostonian, in addition to writing and photography for The Boston Globe, Rolling Stone, and many other publications. He was also the founding arts editor of Boston Metro.