The Boss leads the way through an uncertain land, for one night at least
Saturday, 18 April 2026
Mike “MOD” O'Donnell is a US-based commentator with extensive experience as a director and adviser to New Zealand businesses. He is currently NZTE’s regional trade director for North America. This column represents his personal opinions.
OPINION: There’s a moment driving east out of Santa Monica, somewhere around the Interstate 10 merging into the 405, when Los Angeles stops pretending to be a postcard and starts feeling like a system under load.
People living beneath underpasses, cars abandoned and dreams with them.
Last week that road carried me to the Kia Forum to see Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band on the Land of Hope and Dreams tour.
It was the third time I’ve seen Springsteen. The first time was at Western Springs in 2003. Then again in 2014 at Mt Smart. Both times he was extraordinary. Running the band like a family, not leaving the stage for a solid three hours; absolutely committed to giving working men and women every ounce of value and drop of sweat he could cram into those hours.
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In 2026 Springsteen is 76 years old with a heck of a back catalogue. From the iconic Born to Run to the raw Nebraska and the battered optimism of The Rising.
So last week I’d half expected a nostalgia act. A greatest-hits reel. A comfortable night out with 20,000 people remembering who they used to be with the band that played the soundtrack to their halcyon days.
It wasn’t that.
It was something tighter. More urgent. Less a concert than a reading of the room and of the country.
Springsteen opened with War, which is not how you gently ease a crowd into a Tuesday night. From there it moved straight into Born in the USA, Clampdown (with a nod to Joe Strummer) and My Hometown— songs that, on paper, sit somewhere between anthem and accusation. Live, they landed as something more complicated. Not protest. Not celebration. Recognition.
That was the thread all night.
It didn’t feel like a setlist so much as a progression — confrontation, reflection, then something close to resolve. No Surrender and Darkness on the Edge of Town gave way to The Promised Land and Hungry Heart, before the temperature dropped again with American Skin (41 Shots) and Youngstown. By the time he reached My City of Ruins, the place had gone very still. Then you could have heard a pin drop as he delivered Streets of Minneapolis.
You could feel people holding two ideas at once. Pride, and something harder to name.
A sense that the story they’d grown up with still mattered, but no longer lined up neatly with how things feel day to day in the USA.
What was striking wasn’t what Springsteen said. It was what the crowd did.
At a Springsteen show, America doesn’t argue with itself. It sings.
Fifty-, 60-, 70-year-olds who have been coming to these shows for decades stood alongside twentysomethings who somehow knew every word anyway. People in denim jackets and people in office shirts, loosened at the collar, straight from work. No obvious tribe. No single mood. But when Born to Run hit, they moved as one. When Hungry Heart came around, it was release. And when My City of Ruins drifted out over the forum, it felt less like a song than a shared pause.
If you look at business in North America at the moment, you see a version of this same dynamic playing out differently. Deals taking longer. Decisions pushed out. Buyers more cautious, more deliberate. Not panicked just watchful and deliberate. And careful.
The language of business calls it volatility. Uncertainty. A system adjusting to pressure.
In a concert hall, it looks like something else entirely. It looks like 20,000 people singing songs written decades ago that feel very current again.
Springsteen has always traded in this territory. The gap between promise and reality is hardly new ground for him. What’s changed isn’t the message, but the resonance. The songs haven’t shifted. But perhaps the country has edged closer to them and to the darkness of the edge.
And yet — and this is the part that lingers — it never tipped into despair.
The back half of the set pulled things upward. Badlands had bite. Land of Hope and Dreams felt, if not optimistic, then at least determined. By the end - Born to Run, Dancing in the Dark, Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out - the place had lifted. Not because everything was resolved, but because for a couple of hours it didn’t need to be. And we felt happy to about Scooter and the Big Man.
There’s a line in Land of Hope and Dreams about a train carrying saints and sinners, losers and winners, all on board for better or for worse.
Standing there at the forum, that didn’t feel like a metaphor. It felt like realism set to music. Choosing hope over fear.
No easy answers. No neat resolution. Just a room full of people acknowledging the distance between the stories of the past they inherited and the one they’re living now.
And singing anyway.