Bruce Springsteen: ‘You’ll Be Seeing the E Street Band Pretty Soon’
Bruce Springsteen phoned up SiriusXM’s E Street Radio Wednesday and gave host Jim Rotolo an update on his touring plans.
“We’ll be out there,” he said. “We hoped to be out there this year, but I just didn’t have the confidence or want to take the risk for my audience that it was going to be OK. We put it off a little while. But we’re working on plans to get it all together now, so you’ll be seeing the E Street Band pretty soon.”
Springsteen and the E Street Band originally planned on touring in 2020 behind Letter to You, but the pandemic made anything besides a two-song appearance on Saturday Night Live an impossibility. Late last year, as the Delta wave subsided, plans began coming together for a 2022 world tour. A handful of posters advertising upcoming dates appeared across Europe, including a June 10th, 2022 show at Deutsche Bank Park in Frankfurt, Germany.
The shows were scuttled once Omicron hit near the end of 2021 and the prospects for major concerts this year once again seemed questionable. But Omicron has largely subsided and the concert calendar is packed with major tours and festivals.
Springsteen hasn’t played a show with the E Street Band since their River tour wrapped up with an Australia/New Zealand run in February 2017. Once that tour ended, he focused his energies on his successful Broadway show and his new albums Western Stars and Letter to You. But this is the longest he’s gone without an E Street Band tour since he reformed the band in 1999, and fans are very eager to see them back in action.
It’s unclear when exactly that’s going to happen, and it’s still possible it won’t happen until 2023. But “we’re working on plans to get it together now” and “you’ll be seeing the E Street Band pretty soon” gives fans good reason to hope that they’re going to find a way to gear up before the year wraps. There are still nine months left in 2022, and plenty of big venues that would be happy to host a Springsteen show with little notice.
