]]>
Bruce Springsteen released arguably the most pointed protest song of his career on Wednesday, January 28—written, he said, the same day that 37-year-old ICU nurse Alex Pretti was fatally shot by federal agents amid their immigration enforcement operations in Minneapolis.
“I wrote this song on Saturday, recorded it yesterday and released it to you today in response to the state terror being visited on the city of Minneapolis,” Springsteen wrote in a statement accompanying the song on his social media channels and website. “It’s dedicated to the people of Minneapolis, our innocent immigrant neighbors and in memory of Alex Pretti and Renee Good. Stay free,” he signed the posts.
“King Trump’s private army from the DHS / Guns belted to their coats / Came to Minneapolis to enforce the law / Or so their story goes,” Springsteen snarls at the end of the opening verse.
He goes on to lament the killings of Pretti and Good, naming them directly: “And there were bloody footprints / Where mercy should have stood / And two dead, left to die on snow-filled streets / Alex Pretti and Renee Good.” He describes “Trump’s federal thugs” beating and shooting Pretti, then cites “Miller and Noem’s dirty lies,” referring to the responses to the killings of Good and Pretti by Homeland Security adviser Stephen Miller and Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem.
“Oh our Minneapolis, I hear your voice / Crying through the bloody mist,” he sings in the chorus, vowing, “We’ll remember the names of those who died / On the streets of Minneapolis.”
He also decries immigration officials’ treatment of people of color: “If your skin is black or brown, my friend / You can be questioned or deported on sight.”
The song closes with “ICE out!” protest chants.
]]>
The release of “Streets of Minneapolis” comes less than two weeks after Springsteen’s surprise appearance at the annual Light of Day benefit in Red Bank, where he dedicated his 1978 heartland anthem “The Promised Land” to “mother of three and American citizen Renee Good,” a 37-year-old poet who was shot and killed on January 7.
“[…] I wrote this song as an ode to American possibility…both to the beautiful but flawed country that we are, and to the country that we could be,” he said in a speech beforehand. “Now, right now, we are living through incredibly critical times. The United States—the ideals and the values for which it stood for the past 250 years—is being tested as it has never been in modern times. Those values and those ideals have never been as endangered as they are right now […].”
As in “The Promised Land,” Springsteen’s harmonica solo punctuates the guitar-heavy “Streets of Minneapolis.” An article in Salon noted that the song “borrows [its] melody, at least in part, from ‘Desolation Row,’…from Minnesota’s own Bob Dylan […].” Springsteen’s wife and E Street bandmate Patti Scialfa sings background vocals on the track, as do four members of the gospel-tinged E Street Choir (Ada Dyer, Curtis King, Lisa Lowell and Michelle Moore). Longtime producer Ron Aniello plays bass, drums, organ and piano. The song’s title nods to Springsteen’s socially conscious Academy Award-winning “Streets of Philadelphia,” written for the 1993 Tom Hanks film Philadelphia, a drama centered on the HIV/AIDS crisis.
Photo: Shutterstock/Ben Houdijk
The release also comes on the heels of Springsteen’s “Land of Hope and Dreams” tour with the E Street Band last year, during which he delivered speeches denouncing the Trump administration each night. “In my home—the America I love, the America I have written about, that has been a beacon of hope and liberty for 250 years—is currently in the hands of a corrupt, incompetent and treasonous administration,” he said at the tour’s opening concert in mid-May in Manchester, England.
Setlists for those 16 shows included the tour’s titular song as well as “Long Walk Home”—introduced as “a prayer for my country”—and solemn, soulful performances of “My City of Ruins” from “The Rising,” his 2002 album released in the aftermath of September 11. Shortly after that first Manchester show, he dropped a digital EP of those songs and the speeches that preceded them.
Springsteen told Rolling Stone over the summer that he had finished a solo album, expected sometime in 2026, but did not provide further details about its contents.
Springsteen concluded most shows on last year’s tour with fiery covers of Bob Dylan’s “Chimes of Freedom,” a song he most famously sang at a massive, historic concert in East Berlin in July 1988, about 16 months before the Berlin Wall came down. Prefacing the song, he addressed the crowd: “I’ve come to play rock ‘n’ roll for you,” he said, reciting the words phonetically in German, “in the hope that one day all barriers will be torn down.”
Clarence B. Jones, who grew up in Burlington County, is the subject of The Baddest Speechwriter of All, currently screening at Sundance.
The Friend’s House is Here, premiering at the Sundance Film Festival on January 24, follows a vibrant community of artists staging underground plays in Tehran.
