Watch Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band kick off their 2024 world tour

Six months later Bruce Springsteen put his world tour on hold to help him recover from a painful peptic ulcer, and returned to the stage with the E Street Band on Tuesday night in Phoenix for their first concert of the year. And while the setlist was largely the same as what he delivered nightly in 2023, he made some minor changes and made room for further additions as the year progressed.

The majority of last year's shows started with “No Surrender,” but he loosened up during the stadium portion at the end, when he started blasting out “Lonesome Day” and “Night” before that. He stuck with this trio of songs at the top of the Phoenix show, and also performed “Darlington County” and “Darkness on the Edge of Town” early in the evening. Both songs were only played on select occasions last year.

All 66 shows in 2023 featured a 12-minute cover of “Kitty's Back,” but he put it in Phoenix along with “The E Street Shuffle,” which was played 50 times last year. That freed up nearly 20 minutes of set time that gave him room to play “Spirit in the Night” (played just twice last year) and Ben E. King's “Don't Play That Sound (You Lied),” which withdrew from 2023 is placed in the second week of the tour.

The second half of the show, which opened with the story of his late Castiles teammate George Theiss and an emotionally charged double take of “Last Man Standing” and “Backstreets,” was largely identical to previous sets. But he belted out “Twist and Shout” at the end of the first encore in response to a sign from an 18-year-old fan who was seeing him for the first time.

The tour continues on March 22 at the T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas. He heads to Europe for a series of stages in May, before returning to America in August for a mix of arena and stadium dates along with a headlining slot at the Sea.Hear.Now festival in Asbury Park, New Jersey. It concludes on November 22 at Rogers Arena in Vancouver, British Columbia.

If the past is any precedent, the setlist will continue to evolve over the coming months. It may never reach the point Springsteen hit in the 2010s, where the show would change radically from night to night and receive random sign requests throughout the evening, but it's impossible to say for sure. We have a long way to go before the night closes in Vancouver.

Here's Phoenix's full setlist:
“Lonely Day”
“Night”
“No Surrender”
“Two hearts”
“Darlington County”
“Ghosts”
“Proof all night”
“Darkness on the edge of town”
“Letter to You”
“The Promised Land”
“Spirit in the Night”
“Don't Play That Song (You Lied)”
“Night shift”
“Mary's Place”
“The last survivor”
“Backstreets”
“Because the Night”
“She's the one”
“Wrecking Ball”
“The EAST”
“Badlands”
“Thunder Road”
I call again
“Born to Run”
“Rosalita (Out Tonight)”
“Glory Days”
“Dancing in the Dark”
“Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out”
“Twist and Scream”
I call again
“I will see you in my dreams”