Bruce Springsteen made a new concert documentary called Road Diary: Bruce Springsteen and The E Street Band. It’s available on Disney+ this week. To promote the doc, the Boss spoke to the Telegraph about life, love and politics. Bruce is a longtime Democrat who has endorsed Democratic presidential candidates for as long as I can remember. He’s endorsed Kamala Harris and Tim Walz (Walz is a huge Springsteen fan too), and Bruce really does not like Donald Trump. Bruce hilariously goes all the way OFF on Trump in this interview. Some highlights:

Springsteen would like to correct the record. “I’m not a billionaire. I wish I was, but they got that real wrong. I’ve spent too much money on superfluous things.”

The band is about remembrance: “One of the things our band is about is remembrance. We believe that’s important. I think it’s important in a country, it’s important in a family, it’s important in a band – you honour the people who gave their all.” It also speaks, he adds, to “the audience’s sense of loss”: “You go out on stage to repair yourself, of your hurts and your difficulties, and in doing so, you try to do the same for your audience. You address their grief.”

Liam Payne’s passing. “That’s not an unusual thing in my business. It’s a normal thing. It’s a business that puts enormous pressures on young people. Young people don’t have the inner facility or the inner self yet to be able to protect themselves from a lot of the things that come with success and fame. So they get lost in a lot of the difficult and often pain inducing [things]… whether it’s drugs or alcohol to take some of that pressure off…. I understand that very well. I mean, I’ve had my own wrestling with different things. It’s a grift, man. That’s a part of the story that suckers some young people in, you know, but it’s that old story. Dying young – good for the record company, but what’s in it for you?”

Whether he’s anxious that Trump could win: “On one hand, I’m not that anxious, because I do believe Kamala Harris is going to win. Of course, I’ve been wrong before about this. I think in the States, there’s an enormous anxiety, however, at losing the things that are dearest to us, the danger of losing democracy, rule of law, peaceful transfer of power. And this is a guy who is committed to none of these things. He’s an insurrectionist. You know, he led a coup on the United States government, so there’s no way he should be let anywhere near the office of the presidency.”

He went all the way off on Trump: “Not to mention, he’s mentally ill. The whole thing of standing and swaying for 40 minutes at your town hall? I mean, swaying to music, that’s my job.” He’s genuinely concerned, describing this as “one of the most consequential elections in our nation’s history”, and adds: “Are you going to sleep well knowing that the nuclear codes have been given to Donald Trump? No. No one is.”

[From The Telegraph]

“One of the most consequential elections in our nation’s history” – of course that’s true and it was true in 2020 as well. But every time I hear anything about how the 2020 or 2024 elections were and are so important, so consequential, I’m reminded of the fact that the 2016 election was the most consequential election of my life. In four years, Trump ripped this country to shreds, he destroyed reproductive rights, he changed the Supreme Court (possibly forever), he set back LGBTQ rights for a generation, he tried to ban Muslim people from entering the country and he put babies in cages. Then, after all that, he incited a violent insurrection in an attempt to overturn an election.

Photos courtesy of Avalon Red.