Six months after Bruce Springsteen suspended his world tour so he could recover from a painful peptic ulcer, he was back onstage with the E Street Band Tuesday night in Phoenix, for the first gig of the year. And while the setlist was largely the same as the one he delivered nightly in 2023, he did make some minor alterations, and create space for further additions as the year progresses.
The majority of last year’s concerts kicked off with “No Surrender,” but it loosened up during the stadium portion at the very end when he started breaking out “Lonesome Day” and “Night” prior to it. He stuck with that trio of songs at the top of the Phoenix show, and also performed “Darlington County” and “Darkness on the Edge of Town” early in the night. Both songs were only played on selection occasions last year.
All 66 shows of 2023 featured a 12-minute rendition of “Kitty’s Back,” but he dropped it in Phoenix along with “The E Street Shuffle,” which was played 50 times last year. This freed up nearly 20 minutes of set time that gave him space to play “Spirit in the Night” (played just twice last year) and Ben E. King’s “Don’t Play That Sound (You Lied), which was dropped from the 2023 set in the second week of the tour.
The second half of the show, kicking off with the story of his late Castiles bandmate George Theiss and the emotionally-charged double shot of “Last Man Standing” and “Backstreets,” was largely identical to previous sets. But he did bust out “Twist and Shout” at the end of the first encore in response to a sign from an 18-year-old fan that was seeing him for the first time.
The tour continues March 22 at the T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas. It heads to Europe for a run of stadiums in May, before returning to America in August for a mixture of arena and stadium dates along with a headlining slot at the Sea.Hear.Now Festival in Asbury Park, New Jersey. It wraps up Nov. 22 at the Rogers Arena in Vancouver, British Columbia.
If the past is any precedent, the setlist should continue to evolve in the coming months. It may never reach the point Springsteen hit in the 2010s where the show changed radically from night to night, and he took random sign requests throughout the evening, but it’s impossible to say for sure. We have a long way to go until closing night in Vancouver.
Here is the complete Phoenix setlist:
“Lonesome Day”
“Night”
“No Surrender”
“Two Hearts”
“Darlington County”
“Ghosts”
“Prove It All Night”
“Darkness on the Edge of Town”
“Letter to You”
“The Promised Land”
“Spirit in the Night”
“Don’t Play That Song (You Lied)”
“Nightshift”
“Mary’s Place”
“Last Man Standing”
“Backstreets”
“Because the Night”
“She’s the One”
“Wrecking Ball”
“The Rising”
“Badlands”
“Thunder Road”
Encore
“Born To Run”
“Rosalita (Come Out Tonight)”
“Glory Days”
“Dancing in the Dark”
“Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out”
“Twist and Shout”
Encore
“I’ll See You in My Dreams”
