On January 28th, 2026, Bruce Springsteen released “Streets of Minneapolis,” a protest song he’d written “in response to the state terror being visited on the city of Minneapolis.” He continued, “It’s dedicated to the people of Minneapolis, our innocent immigrant neighbors and in memory of Alex Pretti and Renee Good.” And he signed it, “Stay free, Bruce Springsteen.”
On his website, Springsteen explained that he wrote the song on a Saturday, recorded it the next day, and released it the day after, probably the fastest he’s ever worked in the recording studio. That sense of urgency ties “Streets of Minneapolis” to the same lineage as Neil Young’s “Ohio,” a song written in response to the May 4, 1970 shootings of unarmed Kent State students by the National Guard. “Ohio” was written, recorded and released within weeks, something that was a lot harder to do in 1970 — part of the reason it made it out so quickly is that Atlantic label head Ahmet Ertegun happened to be in LA when CSNY were recording, and personally took the tapes back to NY — and with physical media.
At the time, “Ohio” received criticism similar to the reaction to “Streets of Minneapolis:” a mix of grousing about rich rock stars capitalizing on tragedy combined with grumbling that the song just wasn’t very good. (That’s removing the opinions of the 58% of Americans who thought the students deserved it; they were not buying or listening to the song.) Springsteen must have had his own doubts about his composition; as he explained onstage at Minneapolis’ First Avenue on February 2, where he made a surprise appearance at a benefit show staged by Tom Morello, he had sent the song to Morello — whose own protest music bona fides are impeccable, and whose brief tenure in the E Street Band gives him ranking — asking, “Don’t you think it’s kind of soapbox-y?” Morello’s response: “Bruce, nuance is wonderful, but sometimes you have to kick them in the teeth.”
But “Streets of Minneapolis” is not Springsteen’s first protest song. Across his almost 60-year career, he has addressed war, racism, state-sponsored violence, economic anxiety, and the loss of civil liberties (to name but a few). Here are some of his best moments on that aforementioned soapbox.
“Born In The USA”
Quite possibly the world’s most misunderstood song, “Born In The USA” is indeed an anthem, but it is also — in the right context — 100% a protest number. In 2003, at the first Stateside show after the US invasion of Iraq, Springsteen opened the show with a blistering acoustic version whose meaning could not be misinterpreted. On 2004’s Vote For Change tour, Springsteen’s headlining slot began with a ferocious and proud instrumental version of “The Star-Spangled Banner” on 12-string guitar, followed immediately by a swan dive into a similarly rousing acoustic “Born In The USA.” The version featured above (from 2001’s “Live In New York City” DVD) will give you a small taste of how the song’s meaning becomes impossible to misinterpret in that format.
It’s unfortunate that the song is so broadly misunderstood, because when you can detach it from its jingoistic misinterpretation — like watching the song performed in the middle of a European football stadium — you have the space to appreciate just how much of an amazingly gigantic rocker Springsteen created, without worrying that someone’s going to think you’re one of those people who only listens to the chorus.
But it’s not just that conservatives willfully focus on the chorus, it’s also likely that they’re deliberately ignoring the message in the verses: the story of the military being one of the few refuges for troubled young men who are woefully unprepared for the realities of military service, a condemnation of both American imperialism and calling the government out for how it treats returning veterans. The last chorus alone:
Down in the shadow of the penitentiary
Out by the gas fires of the refinery
I’m ten years burnin’ down the road
Nowhere to run, ain’t got nowhere to go
No one ever asks the politicians who like to play or reference “Born In The USA” about that verse.
“My City of Ruins”
The closing song from 2002’s “The Rising,” the album Springsteen wrote in response to 9/11, “My City of Ruins” was actually written a couple of years earlier, inspired by the then-decades-long economic downslide of Asbury Park, NJ, Springsteen’s adopted hometown. But the composition, which is rooted in gospel traditions, was sufficiently broad and all-encompassing (yet another gospel hallmark) for the song to apply to other circumstances. Long-time fans will remember how the song became the centerpiece of the 2012 tour after the death of Clarence Clemons, used to pay tribute to both the Big Man and late E Street organist Danny Federici.
Springsteen performed the song as the opening number of “A Tribute To Heroes,” the national post-9/11 telethon benefiting victims and their families. But perhaps its most heartbreaking application was when Springsteen and the Seeger Sessions Band played at the first New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival since Hurricane Katrina decimated the city and the region. Writing about the performance for Backstreets Magazine, long-time New Orleans music writer Alison Fensterstock offered: “Other songs in the two-hour set took on extra resonance the way every heartbreak song feels like it’s about you when you’re going through a breakup, except more so. ‘My City of Ruins’ in particular, with its images of rain, wind and empty streets — punctuated by the repeated ‘rise up!’ — was chilling and cathartic.”
“The Promised Land”
In mid-January 2026, Bruce Springsteen made a “surprise” appearance at the annual Light of Day charity concert held on the Jersey Shore. Appearing with friend Joe Grushecky and his band the Houserockers, Springsteen offered, “I wrote this song as an ode to American possibility. Right now we are living through incredibly critical times. The United States, the ideals and the value for which it stood for the past 250 years, is being tested like it has never been in modern times. Those values and those ideals have never been as endangered as they are right now.”
He continued, “If you believe in the power of law and that no one stands above it, if you stand against heavily-armed masked federal troops invading an American city, using gestapo tactics against our fellow citizens, if you believe you don’t deserve to be murdered for exercising your American right to protest, then send a message to this president, as the mayor of the city said: ICE should get the fu*k out of Minneapolis. This song is for you and the memory of the mother of three and an American citizen, Renee Good.”
And then he played “The Promised Land.”
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“The Promised Land” was released on 1978’s “Darkness On The Edge of Town,” not exactly an album remembered for its radical political leanings. But while talking with Rolling Stone journalist Paul Nelson back in the day, Springsteen noted, “My songs are all action songs. They’re action, you know. All my songs are about people at that moment when they’ve got to do something, just do something, do anything.”
So while it’s correct that this song didn’t begin its life as a protest number, sometimes art can transform itself to meet a moment. “The Promised Land” didn’t suddenly become a protest song, but it has helped Springsteen make a point or reinforce a message.
One of “Promised Land”’s most potent uses was as a segue from “American Skin (41 Shots)” the second time he played it, at its debut in New York City. (That composition will be discussed in more detail below.) In his memoir, Springsteen wrote, “I followed ‘American Skin’ with ‘Promised Land,’ two songs about the demand for and refusal to give human recognition and the cost of that refusal.”
He also used that particular segue (of “American Skin” into “Promised Land”) at his first show after George Zimmerman was found not guilty for the 2012 murder of Trayvon Martin in 2013. And that particular pairing became the kind of statement that might make you wonder if you’d missed something in the news that day, a thought I experienced standing on a rugby pitch in the Irish countryside watching Springsteen and E Street perform those two songs together a few weeks later.
With “41 Shots” Springsteen is telling a particular and very American story, and by following it with “Promised Land,” he is reasserting his hopes and dreams and intentions for a better world. It would not have been surprising if it had followed “Streets of Minneapolis” when he recently performed it at First Avenue in Minneapolis.
“American Skin (41 Shots)”
“I just thought it was another piece of music I had written that followed my long career path of dealing with topical subjects. . .” Bruce Springsteen, “Born to Run”
In the spring of 2000, Springsteen wrote a powerful song about the shooting of unarmed African immigrant Amadou Diallo by the New York City Police Department. Diallo was shot 41 times, hence the song’s title, and the officers were acquitted of all charges. Springsteen’s lyrics tell what he believed to be a fair and balanced story from both the point of view of the police and that of immigrant families, but importantly, he also opens it up to include the community at large. As Springsteen writes in his memoir, “In the bridge, the lyrics ‘Is it in your heart, is it in your eyes’ ask the singer and his audience to look inside themselves for their collaboration in events.”
Is it a gun, is it a knife
Is it a wallet, this is your life
It ain’t no secret
No secret, my friend
You can get killed just for living in your American skin
The song was first performed in Atlanta before its debut at Madison Square Garden a week later, a string of 10 sold-out shows ending the Reunion Tour. In that week leading up to that first MSG show, Springsteen was attacked by the New York Post and the Fraternal Order of Police, who called him both “a dirtbag” and “a floating f-g.” The police commissioner wrote to Springsteen and asked him not to play the song. Mayor Rudy Giuliani asked him not to play the song. The existence of “American Skin” became a heated topic on cable news and in newspaper editorials despite the song not having been released, and the fact that you could only have heard it if you were at the concert in Atlanta (or had a direct line to the Springsteen live bootleg community).
During the first show of the MSG run, there was booing and some middle fingers thrown from the crowd (or, as Springsteen relayed, “the New Jersey state bird”), as well as audience members turning their backs to the stage. Springsteen continued to play the song every night of the band’s 10-show run, and has continued to perform “American Skin” regularly over the ensuing 25 years, sometimes as a response to current events — he played it the night Trayvon Martin was murdered, he played it in honor of Michael Brown (as saxophonist Jake Clemons stood onstage with his hands up), and has used it to pay tribute to Breonna Taylor, George Floyd and other Americans murdered at the hands of the police, but also simply as part of a larger narrative arc Springsteen constructs onstage.
“41 Shots” was commercially released on the 2001 “Live In New York City” album that derived from that final MSG stand, and would later be re-recorded — with the addition of some particularly heated guitar work from none other than temporary E Street Band member Tom Morello — for 2014’s “High Hopes.”
“Long Walk Home”
The criminally underrated “Magic” album arrived towards the end of the second George W. Bush administration and featured a half-dozen songs — like “Livin’ In The Future,” “Last To Die,” and the title track, among others — that addressed Springsteen’s disgust at the degradation of democracy, American life and human rights.
One of those songs was “Long Walk Home,” where the narrator is walking through their hometown and finding it all unrecognizable because of what was now missing — homes, businesses, people — before concluding:
My Pa said, “Son, we’re lucky, this town is a beautiful place to be born
It just wraps its arms around you, nobody crowds you, nobody goes it alone
You see that flag down at the courthouse, it means certain things are set in stone
Who we are, what we’ll do and what we won’t”
In 2024, Springsteen would introduce the song by stating, “A prayer for my country,” and it usually followed “Youngstown,” a song about how the American economy was systematically exploited and destroyed by the steel industry.
“Seeds”
This absolutely incendiary song about the modern-day Okies who tried to follow the 1980s oil boom to Texas, only to arrive and discover that the jobs had vanished, is right up there with “Born In The USA” under the category of highly political songs that sneak by everyone who doesn’t listen to the lyrics and just focuses on the music.
“Seeds” is a big, solid bluesy rocker that Nils Lofgren was born to play, with the kind of soul-shouting vocal style that Springsteen adores, and he always sings the hell out of this one. The title is also incredibly clever, an accurate reuse of the Greek poem with the line, “they tried to bury us, but they didn’t know that we were seeds,” which was utilized by the Zapatistas.
“Rocky Ground”
“Rocky Ground” is gospel, “Rocky Ground” ends with rap (courtesy the fantastic Michele Moore, part of the E Street Choir), and “Rocky Ground” features the Victorious Gospel Choir (of which Moore is also a member), who Springsteen found out about because they performed at his mother Adele’s church. (He invited them to perform at his 2003 Christmas shows in Asbury Park.)
It’s a song about having faith, and keeping that faith, as everything around you collapses. It is not a story of someone giving up, but someone continuing to walk ahead, one step at a time, one inch at a time, no matter what else is happening around them. (Along with “The Promised Land,” “Rocky Ground” was the other song I hoped Springsteen might play at First Avenue, but sadly, he barely played it at his own shows.)
“Galveston Bay”
Springsteen’s solo acoustic album, “The Ghost of Tom Joad,” was inspired by his years living in Southern California and his motorcycle rides around the small towns of the desert and regions close to the U.S. border with Mexico. “Joad” features multiple songs specifically about the experience of undocumented people, with songs like “Sinaloa Cowboys,” which tells the story of migrant brothers who got trapped working (and then dying) for the drug cartels, or “Balboa Park,” about underage immigrant boys working as sex workers in San Diego.
With “Galveston Bay,” Springsteen tells the story — based on real-life events — of Vietnamese refugees who settled in the Texas Gulf region because it had a similar geography to their home country. They went into the fishing and shrimping industries and their presence and competition were resented by the local fishermen, who called on the Texas KKK for assistance. One of the Vietnamese fishermen shot and killed two white fishermen and was acquitted in self-defense. Springsteen takes up the story and adds a moment where a man seeking what he believes is retribution against his friends decides to take another path instead and not perpetuate the cycle of violence.
“Hey Blue Eyes”
“They’re holding a committee of treason and lies
Doublespeak and sedition, then somebody dies”
If you’re hearing about this song for the first time, that’s not on you: Springsteen wrote this vicious condemnation of the Bush administration and specifically, what we learned about the military’s treatment of prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison, around the time of 2007’s “Magic,” but left it off the record. It finally surfaced on a 2014 Record Store Day EP, where Springsteen explained, “it’s a metaphor for the house of horrors our government’s actions created in the years following the invasion of Iraq.” What makes this particular song so powerful is the equanimity of the vocal delivery, because you can tangibly feel the barely suppressed rage lurking under the surface. Tom Morello asked if he could cover it; we’re still patiently waiting.
“Roulette”
Written just a few days after the 1979 accident at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant, the worst such accident in U.S. history to date. Three Mile Island was located in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, just a few hours’ drive from Asbury Park, making it also just a few hours’ drive from multiple major population centers. If you’re old enough to remember this event, it was terrifying, not the least because the government communication was inadequate, with residents first cautioned to stay indoors, and then the governor advised that pregnant women and children should evacuate. If you think it caused a panic, you’d be right. The song addresses both the fear of the unknown — how will the event impact the narrator’s family — and sets the tone of uncertainty and panic, as well as conveys the confusion and betrayal from society at large.
We left the toys out in the yard
I took my wife and kids and I left my home unguarded
We packed what we could into the car
No one here knows how it started
It was the first song Springsteen and the E Street Band recorded for the sessions that would become “The River,” but it didn’t make the cut because he worried it was too specific. In 1998, Springsteen told Mojo Magazine, “I may have just gotten afraid — it went a little over the top, which is what’s good about it. In truth, it should have probably gotten put on. It would have been one of the best things on the record.”
Thanks to Keith Harris at Racket in Minneapolis for his reporting from the benefit at First Avenue.
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from music columnist Caryn Rose