Orel Family

Bruce Springsteen, Phoenix, April 16, 2026. All pictures and video by Matthew Orel. Bruce Springsteen is angry. And boy, oh, boy, is he holding on to his anger. Last night, through a bit of clever planning with a family trip, I managed to be in Phoenix for the "Land of Hope and Dreams - No Kings" tour.  It's also, for the most part,  a "no surprises" tour. Last night was the third consecutive show with the same setlist. To some fans, setlist variation still matters. To them, I'd say this: Get over it. Going in, even those of us in "blackout" mode basically knew what to expect. Bruce has been very vocal about his rage over the current administration, culminating in his sudden January release of "Streets of Minneapolis"  and the subsequent announcement of this 20-date E Street Band tour. The show is positioned as a rhetorical call to arms, with Bruce directly stating the purpose multiple times during the show: "This American tragedy ca...

This past Saturday, I returned home from services -- as a mourner I go every day now to say kaddish -- to relax, check my phone, and so forth. Lori wasn't feeling well and was sleeping, so I went to another room. The first thing I saw on my phone was a post from a friend who doesn't post very much, quoting the famous Martin Niemöller poem, along with a video appearing to show an ICE encounter. My friend is in Philadelphia. I wondered, "is something going on in Philly?" But then I saw the word "Nicollet" in the background of the video and realized he hadn't shot the video, it was from Minneapolis. As I watched a little more carefully, I realized I was watching a murder. I turned on the TV. For the next several hours, more numb than I could have foreseen, I watched as the news came in, More videos. Totally predictable preposterous statements from DHS head Greg Bovino and later DHS head Kristy Noem defending the actions of their agents, and labeling the vic...

November 11, 1972 January 6, 2026: Thank you, Cantor Wallach. Thank you, everyone, for coming this morning. Some of you I haven’t seen in many, many years. Thank you all for coming. A special thank you to Rose and Fayona, nurses who helped take care of my mom in her final weeks. I just have a few notes, I’m not going to take very long, I didn’t formally write anything but I sent myself a few notes that I’d try to say in a few minutes and that I thought might be worth hearing. I’m going to start with a brief story from something my mom and I experienced a few years back. I was back here 1990, it happened to be Tisha B’Av, which is, to those who are familiar, it’s one of two Jewish fast days on the calendar, the other, of course, being Yom Kippur. For whatever reason, I was here on a break from my job in California that day. My mom wanted to go to Kings to get some groceries for later on. It’s not one of those non-work days so you can do that, except of course Kings was sampling cookies,...

December 14, 2025. The Stone Pony, Asbury Park, NJ I wasn't even supposed to be here. I was just laying low in Michigan. Oh I was planning to come visit until Saturday anyway, to see my ailing mother at the hospital, and then things got bad and things got worse and I was on a 6am Monday flight out here with no immediate plans to go home. When I got to Overlook, words were gone. Food intake gone. Responses to prompts were gone. This is how it was, all week. A gerontologist called it "delirium" and I learned what "decompensation" means. I wasn't sure she'd last the week. I started making the calls - funeral home, cemetery, spiritual leaders. But... she didn't die. Eddie Manion's facebook post, 11/13/25 On Saturday, I happened to see a facebook post from Eddie Manion ,  "Rehearsing for the show at t he Stone Pony tomorrow!" My immediate reaction was, "this... is possible... if mom stays with us." I asked some friends about the s...

2025 has presented an almost embarrassing haul of new released material by Bruce Springsteen. In June, Bruce released a 7-album set, "Tracks 2," focusing largely on unreleased material from the 1990s. And now... an item that seemed to many fans the holy grail of vault items, "Nebraska 1982," featuring most prominently the oft-rumored but never heard "Electric Nebraska" as well as 4 other discs. Bruce said many times over the years since "Nebraska" came out that he had tried out the tracks with The E Street Band and that everything he tried to do with the band just made the songs worse. So he ended up releasing the cassette tape he'd carried around in his pocket, of his original bedroom demos. But did we fans believe him? Uhhhh... maybe.  Anyway, now we have the evidence. Due to production delays, the official release won't make it out until October 24th, but the songs have started circulating. So... let's get to it! Was Bruce right? ...

The Q&A for Deliver Me From Nowhere: September 29, 2025 The new Springsteen biopic "Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere" has started making the rounds of major film festivals before wider release in October. Yesterday I saw one of the previews at the New York Film Festival , at Alice Tully Hall in Lincoln Center. Yes, there is something special about seeing a film in a state of the art theater with a packed house of more than 1,000 people in New York City, especially when many -- most -- of the attendees are fans of the biopic's subject. There have been many recent biopics focusing on pop icons of the past 60 years. Typically, they fudge the history in the service of mythologizing the subject, leading to some crowning achievement. Think of "Bohemian Rhapsody" and Queen's triumphant performance at "Live Aid," circumstantial facts be damned. Or "A Complete Unknown" and its version of Bob Dylan surviving a violently booing and project...