Place Your Halftime Bets

As some of you may have heard, Bruce Springsteen and The E Street Band are playing the halftime show at Superbowl 43 in Tampa, FL this Sunday. And for anyone who has ever spent their entire life endlessly devoted to the man and his music; or at least seen him perform live at least once or twice; this particular performance comes with considerable intrigue. Forget the fact that the show will be broadcast to every country around the world, or that Bruce has been known to drop the occassional F-bomb mid-performance, or that there exists the very real possibility that the band will have to circumnavigate the battered carcass of Kurt Warner; what is most intriguing for Springsteen fans the world over is the fact that the boys are faced with an extremely limited time constraint. And as anyone who has had the privelege of seeing the heart-stopping, pants-dropping, hard-rocking, booty-shaking, earth-quaking, nerve-breaking, history-making, legendary E Street Band can attest, there is simply no possible way to cram a Springsteen setlist into 10 minutes of network TV.

So the debate has been raging. Which 3 songs will they bust out? Will they go all pre-River? Will they represent every decade? Will the NFL have to get Troy Polamalu to drag the Boss off the stage as he's raging away at Rosalita during his 5th encore?

For the first time in the history of sports, there is more speculation and hype surrounding the halftime show than the game itself.


So my friends and I have been making our predictions. And after 4 full months of contemplation, here is the official seanmccallum.com Springsteen halftime setlist:


Opener - Glory Days (electrifies the crowd immediately; unmistakable opening riff; Springsteen changing the line "I had a friend, was a great baseball player...", to "I had a friend was a big football player..." - thanks to Deeve for that call)



Segueing into - My Lucky Day (obligatory track from the new album; fast enough to keep the crowd on it's feet; a solid enough track to sell a couple million albums with)
This Video has already been removed. To see it in it's entirety, click HERE.



Closing with - Badlands (the big man dominates this classic; the crowd sings along to the point that even John Madden joins in, his mic unknowingly turned on; the cameras pan the sidelines and see a teary-eyed Ken Wisenhunt screaming the lyrics)



Unexpected, unscripted, unendorsed, untelevised encore - Born to Run (Bruce comes running back out as the crew is tearing down the stage; we come back from commercial to find the crowd so fired up that a riot has erupted; the track culminates with the cannons firing from the pirate's ship at Raymond James stadium; the NFL cancels the 2nd half of the Superbowl because they know that nothing could ever top the performance they've just witnessed.)