Why the E Street Band Is Glad Bruce Springsteen Stopped Changing His Set List: ‘It’s Not Stump the Band’

Sometimes things can change for the better.

In the new Hulu and Disney+ documentary Road Diary: Bruce Springsteen and The E Street Band, the singer and his many bandmates take fans behind the scenes of their most recent tour. It was the band’s first in six years, and this time, Springsteen made a major change. Instead of shaking up the set list every night, the 75-year-old musician had one set list for the whole tour. 

And, they say in the doc, most of the band members are thrilled about that change. “On other tours, we would always get a set list maybe 30 minutes before we would go on stage,” Charlie Giordano, keyboardist, notes.

“On the last tour, he was a lot more spontaneous,” singer Michelle Moore says of Springsteen. Fans would write songs they wanted to hear on signs and Springsteen would go out into the crowd grabbing ones and asking “Can we stump the band?” Moore adds, “If you knew it, you knew it, and if you didn’t you just had to catch on.” Giordano calls the practice both “exciting and nerve-racking.”

Soozie Tyrell — who sings and plays both violin and acoustic guitar — adds that when Springsteen found some songs, she would think, “We haven’t played that in 10 years. I don’t think I’ve ever played that. Is there a chart somewhere? Quick, quick!”

“We’re doing 15 different songs a night,” guitar, accordion and mandolin player Nils Lofgren notes. “Nobody knows what the hell is happening. There’s an energy to that, but you can’t really get deep, deep into any one song because you’re just not playing it that often. It’s one of the things I like about this tour is that you can hear your bandmates evolving.”

Bassist Garry Tallent says, “It’s not a jam session, it’s not stump the band. It’s an experience. It’s a show. Bruce has put this set list together meticulously. Start listening a little closer, there’s different emotions being brought out of each song every time you hear it.”

Springsteen explains some of his thought process with the set list in the documentary as well. “[The] set list is going to communicate the story you are trying to tell your audience this time around,” he says. “And the 25 songs I chose to focus on would complete the narrative for what I wanted to say and it would let the audience know who I am at this point in my work life.”

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In the doc, viewers see Springsteen bring the set list to the band for the first time. It’s three hours long. “After six years thought we might scale back a bit,” notes Jake Clemons, the saxophonist who has filled in for his uncle Clarence Clemons since his 2011 death. “Can’t do that. Can’t disappoint the fans,” Springsteen jokes.

The set list for the tour, which began in 2023, ultimately included four songs from the group's 2020 album Letter to You as well as Springsteen classics like “Thunder Road,” “Born to Run” and “Dancing in the Dark.”

Many of the songs are about death and Springsteen’s friends, family and band members who are now gone. That includes the show’s last encore, which features Springsteen, alone on stage, singing an acoustic version of “I’ll See You in My Dreams.”

Road Diary: Bruce Springsteen and The E Street Band is streaming now on Hulu and Disney+.