Five life lessons from a Bruce Springsteen concert

livemint.com:

Lonesome Day. Fifteen minutes later they were singing No Surrender, my favourite Boss song. At that moment as I stood up and clapped and clapped and clapped some more, the pain in my stomach totally disappeared.

Halfway through the song when Springsteen said come on Steve, like he does every time he sings the song live, asking his bandmate, Little Stevan (Steven Van Zandt), to join him at the centre of the stage, to sing the chorus of the song together, I realised that my life as I had lived it, and as I hope to live it, had peaked. I had seen Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band sing No Retreat No Surrender live. In my head I was the only one at Wembley Stadium, and the Boss and his band were playing just for me.

And that feeling stayed, going up and down, as the band played some of my favourite songs, peaking again with what is possibly Springsteen’s most famous song, Dancing in the Dark. The concert ended just before 10.30pm, before what they call the curfew set in, given that Wembley is a residential area. The band had sung non-stop for nearly 200 minutes.

There was no opening act. No breaks. And no chitchatting, which so many new-generation singers do to kill time.

There was no “I would like to thank you and him and her and them" as well at the end of the concert. Springsteen sang and the band played. Non-stop.

They started on time. They ended on time, starting with Lonesome Dayand ending with a Springsteen solo, I’ll See You in My Dreams. Fifteen to twenty minutes after the concert ended, my sister and I were out of the stadium, and on the London underground, making our way back to the hotel, totally gobsmacked by what we had seen. And as we made our way to our hotel, thoughts about the concert started popping