YouTube is full of amazing material. When I became a fan in the mid-1980s, even the shortest video clip of Bruce Springsteen felt like a rare treasure. Today, concert footage, interviews, and live performances are available everywhere online. You can really start anywhere: with the legendary performance of Rosalita in Phoenix in 1978, Bruce's gospel-preacher-style band introduction during Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out on the E Street Band reunion tour in 1999 and 2000, the deeply emotional introductions to The River in 1985, the stories he told in between song during his Broadway show between 2017 and 2021, or the speeches before My City of Ruins on the current 2026 tour, where he calls for peace, justice, and unity in a country in crisis.

Whatever you choose, you'll immediately experience the physical intensity of Springsteen's performances and voice, the many ways he bridges the distance between stage and audience, and the expressions on the faces of people listening, dancing, singing along, and thanking him for articulating emotions they often feel themselves but may never have been able to put into words. Of course, nothing can fully replace the experience of a live concert. But videos can still give a powerful impression of it — especially the extraordinary footage from Springsteen's appearance at the 1979 No Nukes concerts in New York. As I write in the book:

Springsteen's body language on stage conveys an immediate emotional engagement with the music his audience is experiencing at the same time — and from this shared experience and simultaneity can grow the feeling of being directly addressed, understood, and energized by what is being performed.

I try to make scenes and experiences like these accessible to readers, even though it's difficult to fully capture the joy and intensity they create in words. But I think it is important because it gives us a chance to challenge the sociological idea that the interaction between artists and fans is merely "parasocial." There are simply too many examples showing that these relationships are experienced as meaningful and real.

My colleague Daniel Cavicchi already explored this thirty years ago in his dissertation Tramps Like Us, using ethnographic methods to study what Springsteen fans actually experience and how they make sense of it. I felt that it was time to reconnect with that approach and to emphasize fandom for what it really is: a way of enriching, structuring, and energizing people's lives.

And the fact that fans may never meet Springsteen in person doesn't diminish those effects at all. Or, as Springsteen himself once sang about missed encounters: "If you can't make it, stay hard, stay hungry, stay alive, and meet me in a dream of this hard land."