Credit: Far Out / Carl Lender
Fri 4 September 2026 1:00, UK
Bruce Springsteen never wanted to forget the magic that came with being a member of the E Street Band.
He didn’t always have the most stable life whenever he came off the stage, but for those few hours when he was onstage, every single member of the band was like an unofficial family member whenever they started performing together. And while they did have enough brotherhood energy to make a pretty decent Fast and Furious movie, Springsteen knew when he was lucky to have found the right person for every single role in the group.
Because as much as ‘The Boss’ was the one calling the shots and writing all the songs, he knew that the band were helping to give the tunes flesh and blood. These stories were dense and powerful when they were played on acoustic guitar, but the sounds of the roaring guitars and the pummelling drums were what brought the drama out of tunes like ‘Thunder Road’ and ‘Born to Run’.
Max Weinberg deserves a lot of credit for making every one of those songs have that same sense of punch that we know and love, but there’s also a lot more going on that you feel rather than hear. Roy Bittan’s piano work across most of his albums is some of the most beautiful pieces in his catalogue, and there aren’t enough words in the English language to capture the kind of emotion that Clarence Clemons’s saxophone breaks leave you with when you are listening to them in a packed arena.
But you can’t really have one of the biggest rock and roll bands on Earth if you don’t have the guitars out front and centre. Springsteen was the one playing everything straight-up the middle every time he performed, and while Stevie Van Zandt was his partner in crime and would forever be one of his musical brothers in many respects, getting someone like Nils Lofgren in the band was a godsend.
If anything, Lofgren was overqualified for the job when he first joined the band, but given the amount of music that he had worked on, he had a sense of what Springsteen’s songs needed long before ‘The Boss’ even fleshed them out. A lot of the biggest tunes in his catalogue were already set in stone by that time, but Lofgren brought in that extra spice that made every one of their shows come alive whenever he played.
And when talking about Lofgren later, Springsteen credited the guitarist for being the one person who helped give the band a bit more variety in everything they were playing, saying, “The E Street band casts a pretty wide net. Our influences go all the way back to the early primitive garage music, and also, we’ve had everything in the band from jazz players to Kansas City trumpet players to Nils Lofgren, one of the great rock guitarists in the world. Our ability to spread out – stretch out and gather things in from a lot of other areas you might not expect – is pretty good.“
Further reading: From The Vault
That kind of variety is something that came easy to Lofgren, though. Even before he became a star in his own right, he was already working with Neil Young, and when the Canadian icon gave him anything else but a guitar on After the Gold Rush, it was his job to make something that could sound beautiful even if he was sitting behind a piano that he hadn’t fully learned how to play yet.
Those kinds of instincts aren’t always easy to work on, but that’s also the mark of a great musician. Anyone can become complacent playing the same way all the time, but the best kinds of musicians are the ones who keep switching things up and showing everyone what can be done if they only have a few tricks to work with.
