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Bruce Springsteen celebrated the release of his new documentary, Road Diary: Bruce Springsteen and The E Street Band, with an unforgettable iHeartRadio ICONS special on Friday (October 15), performing a slew of his most beloved hits and revealing intimate details about the long-awaited project.
Tracks including 1975's "10th Avenue Freeze Out" and "She's The One," 1978's "Prove It All Night," 1984's "Glory Days," 1986's "No Surrender," and 2020's "Last Man Standing," brought fans on a journey through time as host Jim Kerr asked The Boss about post-pandemic touring, the theme behind the documentary, its "heartbeat," and more!
Amid the rise of the Covid19 pandemic, the "Born in the U.S.A" standout wasn't sure he would ever perform live again, and that frightened him.
"Well, it was so frightening because obviously there was that one point where nobody knew what the future held. And I'm thinking, will I ever get to stand in front of a group of people and play music again? Nobody could tell you. Yes you would. It was just this enormous loss."
Despite their hiatus, Springsteen and the E Street Band made a seamless return the stage after regaining their sense of tempo and spacing. The new documentary follows the star and his band through their first tour in six years (Springsteen and E Street Band 2023 Tour), perfectly capturing life on the road from behind the scenes of each show.
In fact, the tour's set list (which Springsteen referred to as "art") actually helped craft the narrative of the documentary in that it "grew out of the themes" present within their most recent album, 2020's Letter to You.
"I would say it grew out of the themes that were on Letter to You, our most recent E Street band album. And those themes were about mortality and life and death and old friends and losing old friends and just really still living through rock and roll music, but at an age where nobody thought you ever would, you thought. And so I was interested in constructing a set around those themes, and that was pretty much what I did."
The album gave Springsteen the inspiration to craft the documentary, and his undying passion for music brought it to life.
"There was something that was in me when I was 15 or 16. It's still in me now. It hasn't changed at all. There's this inner heart of what I do that hasn't been affected by the things that have happened to me or my good fortune or troubles that I've had along the way, or it's remained constant. That heartbeat has remained constant. So that's what it is for me."
The documentary also zooms in on Springsteen's wife, Patti Scialfa (a member of the E Street Band since 1994), and performance difficulties she's faced since being diagnosed with blood cancer in 2018. The "Dancing in the Dark" artist, who wed Scialfa in 1991, shared that she is not able to play a full show, but does enjoy joining in for a few songs.
"We realized she had an illness about six years ago, so we put it off for a long time and figured, well, when the time is right, it'll come around. And basically as we started this tour and Patti talked about it, she said, well, I want to reveal it to the fans and to the public, I think at some point during this year. So she basically felt, well, once we had the film, she said she felt like the film was the best place."
Springsteen hopes that fans who watch the documentary learn a little more about the band, and enjoy their time "behind the curtain."
Check out Road Diary: Bruce Springsteen and The E Street Band on Hulu and Disney+ and listen to everything Bruce Springsteen and The E Street Band on iHeartRadio now!