Bruce Springsteen joins Bleachers onstage in Asbury Park for two songs

Bruce Springsteen walked out during a Bleachers set at the Shadow of the City festival in Asbury Park on Friday, August 28, and stayed for two songs. Jack Antonoff had begun playing Tom Waits' Jersey Girl, a song Springsteen has been associated with since his own 1985 version, when the older man appeared beside him at the microphone.

The pair then played Chinatown, which they released together in late 2020. That December the two New Jersey acts recorded a stripped back rendition on the roof of Electric Lady Studios in New York City. They played it live together once more before a fully electric arrangement surfaced in 2022, and this was the first time it had come back around.

Antonoff spent part of the set talking about what a hometown bill meant to him, going back to being a teenager selling tickets to get inside the Stone Pony. "There's nothing like playing in the place you wrote the songs from," he told the crowd, before thanking the audience, his friends and his family.

Springsteen has had a busy and unusually public year. His Land Of Hope And Dreams tour finished in Philadelphia in May, a run shaped by his open criticism of the Trump administration. In July he turned up at a Bon Jovi show at Madison Square Garden for Who Says You Can't Go Home and The Promised Land, and earlier in August he said that his wife and E Street Band bandmate Patti Scialfa is in remission from cancer after more than eight years with multiple myeloma.

Bleachers released their album Everyone For 10 Minutes in May and now face their largest European and UK headline run. It opens in Milan on November 5 and takes in Munich, Berlin, Oslo, Stockholm, Hamburg, Amsterdam, Brussels and Paris, then Bristol, Glasgow, Leeds, Birmingham, Dublin and Manchester, closing at the Eventim Apollo in Hammersmith on December 3. One pound or one euro from every ticket goes to The Ally Coalition, which works with LGBTQ+ young people.

Guest spots like this one are close to a fixture of the Jersey shore rock circuit, and Springsteen keeps finding reasons to take them. He is also booked to headline the Stand Up For Heroes benefit in New York later this year, another night built on the same instinct to show up where he is wanted.