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The fact that “Road Diary: Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band” even exists goes against everything the Boss used to believe. Up until a few years ago, he admits he was “very superstitious” about filming the band.
“I didn’t believe that the magician should look too closely at his magic trick, that it might alter it in some way,” Springsteen tells Variety’s Awards Circuit Podcast, in the Emmy season kickoff episode. “And we were doing fine… It’s really amazing that we have the films that we have from when we were a younger man, because I was pretty much against filming.”
Directed by longtime collaborator Thom Zimny, “Road Diary” — currently streaming on Hulu and Disney+ — contains loads of that archival film, including 1975 footage from London’s Hammersmith Apollo. “What got captured got captured almost by accident,” he says. “At the Hammersmith Apollo, the BBC just filmed it. I don’t know if I was even aware of them filming it that night, and I didn’t look at it for 30 years.”
But in recent years, Springsteen changed his tune. “We’re at a point now where we should be filming at least everything we do,” he says. “Once a tour or once an album, I enjoy filming, including films with our records. Now it’s just a part of what we do.” With Zimny, that has included “Letter to You,” “Western Stars” and “Springsteen on Broadway.”
“Road Diary” chronicles Springsteen’s 2023-2025 world tour, which was seen (especially early on) as even more introspective than usual. Springsteen came into the tour with a very specific idea of theme and flow, including a setlist that was pretty rigid at first.
“I had a very clear idea of what I wanted to sing and write about, which was the band and our philosophy — and what it feels like to age alongside of your friends, and what it feels like at this age to experience your mortality,” he says. “You see your friends passing rather often these days. Those were issues that were on my mind.”
That’s why the Commodores’ “Nightshift” became an unlikely cover for Springsteen, but it’s now a staple and showstopper in his concerts. “ I always loved that song,” he says. “I remember sitting in a bar in Red Bank and just having a drink, and it came on the playlist. And I got choked up. I was a few tequilas in, and that helped, I suppose, but I heard that song and I said, ‘God, I love that song.’ It was a little bit of a lost masterpiece. It wasn’t a song that people mentioned much. So when I was going to do my soul covers album, I said, ‘I want to do “Nightshift!” It ended up being a nice duet between Curtis [King] and I, and it’s just the bottom line is the emotion is simply in the song. It’s a beautiful song about people passing and working on the night shift.”
The film pays tribute to late original E Street Band members Clarence Clemons (who died in 2011) and Danny Federici (who died in 2008), including old interviews.
“Both of them come from a film that I had worked on about ‘Darkness on the Edge of Town,’” Zimny says. “And for years, I’ve saved those clips and felt like ‘Road Diary,’ I had this mission to not only bring the sonic qualities of those players and guys in E Street in the forefront, but literally to see their expressions again, their smiles, hear the musicality of their voices. I thought a lot about my experience as a fan and the importance of that. I wanted to explore the E Street history, but also the presence of being in the pit and taking in that show.”
Of course, not everything’s in the film. Springsteen was forced to postpone several dates at the end of 2023 after being diagnosed with peptic ulcer disease, but that hiatus isn’t addressed here.
“I didn’t think my peptic ulcer was film-worthy, so we left it out,” Springsteen says. “I actually enjoyed the time off, but you hate disappointing your fans. And it actually took a while for the whole thing to calm down and give back to my to myself. So it was an unusual experience, because I’m usually pretty ironclad. But no, we never considered it making it part of this story.”
Up next in Springsteenland, Jeremy Allen White will be seen in the biopic “Deliver Me From Nowhere,” playing the Boss in a feature about the making of his 1982 album “Nebraska.” The film is adapted by Warren Zanes’ book of the same name and comes from director/writer Scott Cooper.
“They pitched the idea, and I said, ‘it sounds like fun,’” Springsteen says. “It’s an interesting concept, because it’s only a couple of years out of my life. It’s ’81, ’82, and centered around the creation of that particular record while I was simultaneously recording ‘Born in the USA’ and also going through some personal difficulties that I’ve been living with my whole life. But it’s fantastic.”
Springsteen says he was impressed by what he saw of Jeremy Allen White, who’s playing the musician during that era. “I was on tour during a lot of it, so they filmed a good amount of it without me there,” Springsteen says. “But I was on set sometimes. It was interesting to see it played out, to see your grandmother’s house again, and to go inside and get a general feeling of what it was like when you were very young. So I enjoyed all those parts of it.”
The star also recently made waves on social media when he attended a Los Angeles Lakers game – and caught a flying basketball. “It was either catch it or bounce it off my head,” he says. “So I decided I’d catch it.”
As for what’s next, Springsteen and the band hit the road once again in May for dates in Europe, followed by Canada. Would he consider another live box set chronicling his last few decades touring? “What we’re doing now is basically, we release every show,” he notes. “You can have any live show that you want, shortly after we do it. It’d be possible to do a live album again, if we felt like it. But I think they’re less in demand these days, because people have the ability to purchase any of the show they’ve been at, or any of a hundred others.”
Asked about the state of the country — and music’s role in responding to what is happening to our democracy — Springsteen says it’s something he’s thinking about. “One of the artists’ jobs to make sense of existence and to make sense of the current times that you live in, and to contextualize those times,” he says. “Every artist does it in a different way. So I’ve got that on my mind, and I’m sure it’ll be reflected in our next leg of the tour.”
