It’s been seven years since Bruce Springsteen released his acclaimed orchestral pop record Western Stars, but he’s never played any of the songs at a public concert despite all the touring he’s done in that time. That finally changed Monday evening when he performed his annual acoustic set at the Stand Up For Heroes benefit concert at New York City’s David Geffen Hall. The show included the Western Stars songs “Hello Sunshine” and “Moonlight Motel,” in addition to 2007’s “I’ll Work for You Love” and “Dancing in the Dark.”
In keeping with the grand tradition of Stand Up For Heroes, which is organized by the Bob Woodruff Foundation and has raised $123 million for veterans and their families over the past 20 years, Springsteen sprinkled dirty jokes throughout his set. (The show also included performances by Josh Johnson, Hasan Minhaj, the Resilient, Jon Stewart, and Alex Warren.)
“Guy goes into the library,” Springsteen deadpanned to the crowd. “Goes up to the librarian. He goes, ‘Ma’am, do you have a book on small penises?’ She goes, ‘I don’t think it’s in yet.’ ‘Yeah, that one.'”
He also revived the “voodoo penis” joke that he told at the 2018 Stand Up For Heroes event. It’s about a man who worries his wife will cheat on him while she’s out of town, so he buys her a “voodoo penis” that will magically go anywhere it’s asked.
“She realizes the husband didn’t tell her the word to turn off the voodoo penis,” Springsteen said. “After about 10 or 20 minutes, she’s had enough. She’s starting to get really nervous. ‘I gotta go to the hospital.’ She jumps in the car, hits the gas, she’s going 90 miles per hour in a 25-mile-per-hour zone. And she gets pulled over by a state trooper. He says, ‘License and registration.’ She says, ‘Officer, you don’t understand. A voodoo penis! A voodoo penis!’ He says, ‘Voodoo penis, my ass.'”
A joke about a sex shop worker selling a thermos to a woman requesting a plaid dildo was also familiar, though still delivered quite well. But the Western Stars songs were the clear highlight. In April 2019, Springsteen played the album in its entirety at a special concert in a barn on his New Jersey farm that was recorded for the Western Stars concert film and soundtrack. Last month, he sang “Stones,” “Hello Sunshine,” and “Moonlight Motel” during a private jam session at Danny Clinch’s Transparent Clinch Gallery in Asbury Park, New Jersey, on the same bill as Tom Morello, Dave Matthews, Jesse Malin, Daryl “DMC” McDaniels, and Taylor Momsen. But neither of those events was open to the public.
In 2025, Springsteen explained to Rolling Stone why he’d held back from playing songs from the album at his arena and stadium shows. “If I was going to do that, I’d go out on probably a smaller tour, where I might engage an orchestra and play those records specifically,” he said. “When I go out with the E Street Band, I go out to do a rock show. I want to come out, put the pedal to the metal for three hours, and exhaust you, myself, and anybody in the immediate 20-mile vicinity. And so, there’s certain things that mix and certain things that don’t mix for me, and that’s sort of the way I look at the work that I do with the band.”
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Stand Up For Heroes was the final event on Springsteen’s public calendar for 2026. But he is working on two separate solo albums. “I did finish one, and it is done,” he told Rolling Stone in September. “I’m in the process of working on this other one, which, because of the nature of the material, felt like it should come out first. So that’s the situation I’m in. I’m trying to finish that up, and I’d like to release that first. And then this other record that I made, which is not time-relevant, it can come out at any time and it’ll work.”
He’s not sure exactly when he’ll tour again. “Well, we toured quite a bit, and we toured the previous spring,” he said. “We toured this spring. And these days that’s what I like to do. I would like to go out and do 20, 30 shows. I don’t imagine a 140-show E Street tour will happen again. It’s just time is too short right now. But I do imagine a good series of simply shorter tours where we touch different places at different times. And the band is playing so well. In my opinion, if you saw this show, you saw one of the best shows we’ve ever done. The band is playing so well that we have a happy life there, and that’ll continue.”
