An American Duology: this year's major anniversaries of "American Skin (41 Shots)" & "American Land"
- Shawn Poole with Greg Drew
- 7 minutes ago
- 6 min read
August 30, 2026
[A NOTE FROM GREG DREW AND SHAWN POOLE: This long-planned anniversary feature of ours wouldn't be anywhere near as special as it now is, if our friends from Living Colour, Corey Glover and Will Calhoun, and our friend from Appleseed Recordings, Jim Musselman, hadn't agreed to sit down with us recently for extensive conversations about this great music. To these three gentlemen, whose recorded interviews are linked below, we owe very special thanks indeed, right up front. So thanks again, guys, and please read on, everyone...]
By the time it's over, 2026 will have marked major anniversaries for two of Bruce Springsteen's most explicitly political songs: "American Skin (41 Shots)" and "American Land." In addition to both songs coincidentally featuring the word "American" in their titles, they each happen to have been released originally in the form of a live recording obtained from a summertime Springsteen concert held in Madison Square Garden. More important, this year both of these songs returned to becoming essential parts of Springsteen's nightly concert setlist, for his 2026 Land of Hope & Dreams American Tour with the E Street Band. So let's start with some basic background on each song, beginning with "American Skin (41 Shots)"...
2026 marked the 25th anniversary of "American Skin (41 Shots)" getting its first official release, back in the early spring of 2001, as a major highlight of the Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band: Live in New York City album. Eleven days after the album's release, its accompanying concert film, which closed powerfully with "American Skin (41 Shots)," was first broadcast on HBO. And later that year, in November, an expanded home-video version of the Live in New York City film was released, as well.
Springsteen chose to write, perform, and release his song in the aftermath of the 1999 killing of 23-year-old Amadou Diallo by New York Police Department officers. Click below to hear the full-length, first official release of "American Skin (41 Shots)," recorded live at Madison Square Garden on July 1, 2000 and released on March 27, 2001:
In addition, October of 2026 will mark the 20th anniversary of "American Land"'s first official release, as part of We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions - American Land Edition. The Seeger Sessions album was first released in the spring of 2006, but it later was decided to release an expanded version of the album that would include additional audio and video elements. Among them was a recording of Bruce Springsteen and The (Seeger) Sessions Band's debut live performance of "American Land," which took place at their Madison Square Garden concert in the summer of 2006. A non-live (Seeger) Sessions Band version of the song has never been released, but a studio version recorded during Springsteen's 2011 Wrecking Ball sessions got released on a special bonus-tracks edition of the Wrecking Ball album. Click below to hear the first officially released version of "American Land," recorded live at Madison Square Garden on June 22, 2006 and released on October 3, 2006. (Be sure to listen closely, too, for a small section of the song's originally performed lyrics - "...the Puerto Ricans, illegals, the Asians, Arabs miles from home..." - which eventually got rewritten and sung differently for all subsequent performances:)
To mark these two major anniversaries, we recently held special conversations with some famous friends who we knew could offer some unique knowledge and insights on these songs. To our pleasant surprise, we got even more - much more - than the excellent contributions we already expected from each of them.
For "American Skin (41 Shots)," we spoke with Corey Glover and Will Calhoun from the Grammy-winning, groundbreaking band Living Colour, which was the first major act to cover the song in several of their 2001 concerts, beginning just a few months after Springsteen first released his July 2000 live version of it. Living Colour's immensely moving and enduring version of "American Skin (41 Shots)" closed their performance at the 2001 Montreaux Jazz Festival, which fortunately was filmed/recorded professionally, broadcast on television, and remains preserved online for you to watch/listen below:
Calhoun and Glover were kind enough to spend almost an hour with us, discussing "American Skin (41 Shots)" and why performing it was so important to them. They also compared and contrasted their 2001 performances of the song at Montreaux, Switzerland and - just over two weeks later - at New York's Central Park Summerstage, only about six miles away from the Bronx apartment-building doorway where Amadou Diallo was killed. They then went even deeper, with Corey Glover discussing his family's Asbury Park connections and their personal history of dealing with racism in the Jersey Shore town, Will Calhoun talking about how he's come to admire Bruce Springsteen's musical and political moves over the years, what it was like to recently discuss and share the video of Living Colour's 2001 "American Skin (41 Shots)" performance in Montreaux with Springsteen and guitar-tech Kevin Buell, and both Corey and Will sharing how moved and impressed they were by Kadiatou Diallo's conduct and leadership choices after the killing of her son.
It was a riveting, deadly serious, but also at times appropriately and good-naturedly humorous conversation. We strongly encourage everyone to listen to our recording of it in full using the links below, embedded from our SoundCloud and YouTube platforms:
...and please be sure to connect with Living Colour, Will Calhoun, and Corey Glover online for more information on all of their various upcoming projects. You'll be very glad that you did.
We also recently had an equally great Summertime 2026 conversation about "American Land" with our friend Jim Musselman, the founder/CEO of Appleseed Recordings, which eventually became the 21st-century record-label home for Pete Seeger and many other folk/blues/Americana greats. Musselman led the effort to get Bruce Springsteen involved as just one of the many contributing artists on Appleseed's late-nineties initial release, Where Have All the Flowers Gone: The Songs of Pete Seeger (now sadly out-of-print/unavailable from Appleseed, though essential elements of it, including Springsteen's contribution, remain available on the label's 2018 collection Appleseed’s 21st Anniversary: Roots & Branches.)
Musselman's persistence would lead unexpectedly to Bruce recording an entire album's worth of Pete Seeger songs (based in part on a list of titles suggested by Musselman) and launching the great (Seeger) Sessions Band tour behind that album. Jim never gave up, even after it looked like he might never achieve his goal of getting Bruce Springsteen to record at least one Pete Seeger song. (Check out the two Jon Landau letters photographed below, courtesy of Jim's personal archives:)
So of course there truly is no better person to talk to about "American Land," a Springsteen composition derived from Pete Seeger's recording of "He Lies in the (an) American Land," which itself was derived from a 1940s Slovakian song/poem by a Pennsylvania steelworker named Andrew Kovaly. Jim told us the story of how Kovaly connected with Pete Seeger, a story also told once by Pete Seeger himself in this live version of "He Lies in an American Land" from the 2009 Appleseed Recordings release Live in '65, derived from long-unheard reel-to-reel tapes recorded at a February 1965 Seeger concert in Pittsburgh, PA, and rediscovered after having been stored for years in Seeger's barn(!):
As Living Colour's Will Calhoun and Corey Glover did in our "American Skin (41 Shots)" discussion, Jim Musselman dove deeply into our half-hour discussion of "American Land," detailing how Bruce Springsteen used the folk process to create something new from older music, a song that is much more hopeful and anthemic than its original source material. (Indeed, to this day "American Land" remains the only song from Springsteen's Seeger Sessions period that he regularly performs with the E Street Band in their concerts together, continuing to hold a highly prominent position in each night's encores.)
Musselman also provided us with many more facts and insights about what is one of the most interesting, important, and - especially here in the U.S. - underrated periods of Bruce Springsteen's career. Among many other things, you'll learn about the remaining yet-to-be-released Seeger Sessions outtakes, why "you can't trust Dylan" but "you can trust Bruce," and exactly how Jim Musselman once got a vinyl copy of Greetings From Asbury Park, NJ into the hands of the man now known as Pope Leo XIV.
Check it all out below, again embedded from our SoundCloud and YouTube platforms:
