Another building-opening for Bruce, but this time it's for the new Obama Presidential Center

June 17, 2026

Bruce Springsteen certainly has come a long way from his days of playing supermarket grand openings with his early band The Castiles to the public opening of a new building named after himself - The Bruce Springsteen Center for American Music, of course - just last weekend. But tomorrow, Thursday, June 18, he'll help to open a building quite unlike any he's ever helped to open before: his first-ever gig at a U.S. Presidential Center's opening.

Springsteen will be among the musicians performing at the grand opening ceremony for The Obama Presidential Center in Chicago. He's a major part of a lineup that includes Christina Aguilera, Marc Anthony, Common, Jennifer Hudson, John Legend, The Roots, Tems, U2's Bono & The Edge, Eddie Vedder, and Stevie Wonder. The ceremony is scheduled to begin at 12pm ET. You can click here to watch it live online via Obama.org.

The event will reunite Springsteen with Bono less than a week after the U2 frontman joined Robert DeNiro and Patti Smith in presenting Bruce with this year's Harry Belafonte Social Justice Award at this year's Tribeca Film Festival. While it was moving and inspiring to learn that Springsteen dedicated his Belafonte award to "all the citizens of Minneapolis and Los Angeles and Portland who stood against the federal invasion of their cities this year," it was far less inspiring - to say the least - to read about Bruce actually apologizing - humorously, but still supportively - to Bono for not allowing "Girls in Their Summer Clothes" to be used in one of the tax-evading Irish neoliberal's exceedingly corporate-friendly Red projects. Here's hoping that tomorrow's ceremony won't feature any similarly disappointing moments. (Hey, at least we can agree that the story told at Tribeca about DeNiro introducing Bruce's performance at the 2018 Tony Awards was flat-out hilarious.)