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As the time approached 10:30 Tuesday night — nearly three hours after Bruce Springsteen had marched onstage at Inglewood’s Kia Forum alongside 18 of his musical comrades — the 76-year-old rock legend told the crowd he hadn’t intended to be there.

“This is a tour that we never planned,” he said. “The E Street Band is here with you tonight because we need to feel your hope and your strength. And we want to bring some hope and bring some strength for you.”

It wasn’t impossible to believe him.

After a two-year trek that finally wrapped last summer amid the release of a massive box set and a splashy Hollywood biopic, Springsteen might’ve been expected to spend 2026 counting his money and his accolades. Yet the way he tells it, the actions of a “corrupt, incompetent, racist, reckless and treasonous” president and his administration spurred him back into action.

“If you’re feeling helpless, if you’re feeling hopeless, if you’re feeling betrayed, if you’re feeling frustrated, if you’re feeling angry — I mean, I know I’ve been,” he said.

Tuesday’s show was the first of two this week at the Forum.

(Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)

Thus the hastily arranged Land of Hope & Dreams tour: two months of U.S. concert dates that began last week in Minneapolis, where federal immigration agents killed two American citizens in January, and will wrap May 27 with a stadium show in Washington, D.C.

“The White House — this White House — is destroying the American idea,” Springsteen proclaimed during Tuesday’s gig, the first of two this week at the Forum.

Before we get to the performance itself, let’s acknowledge that the Boss is sticking his neck out here. Sure, he’s protected by his wealth and his celebrity; sure, he’s preaching to the choir in every city he and the E Street Band visit.

But what other musician on Springsteen’s level is speaking out the way he is right now?

On Tuesday, he introduced “Streets of Minneapolis” — a brand-new protest song in which he mentions both Alex Pretti and Renée Good by name — with a vividly detailed monologue about the circumstances of their deaths. Then he led his players through a fervent rendition of the driving folk-rock tune.

“It’s our blood and bones / And these whistles and phones / Against Miller and Noem’s f— lies,” Springsteen sang — one lyric that might’ve inspired President Trump this month to urge his followers to boycott the singer, whom he compared in a social media post to a “dried up prune who has suffered greatly from the work of a really bad plastic surgeon.” (In truth, Springsteen probably enjoyed that.)

Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band

(Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)

Whatever the risks of his speechifying, you had to admire — here in our age of political infotainment — the natural finesse with which Springsteen threaded his prepared rhetoric into Tuesday’s set. He knew just when to have the E Streeters vamp so he could talk about NATO and USAID; he knew when it was wiser to lead the audience in a chant of “ICE out.”

Indeed, as much as he was speaking his mind, Springsteen was providing his fans with an opportunity to work out their own anxieties in rowdy singalong versions of classics like “Born in the U.S.A.,” “No Surrender,” “The Promised Land” and “Out in the Street.”

If the concert’s animating impulse was outrage, the prevailing emotion was joy, even — or especially — when the music was at its most pointed, as in covers of Edwin Starr’s “War” and “Clampdown” by the Clash.

With an extra E Street member in Rage Against the Machine’s Tom Morello, Springsteen made “Badlands” and “Death to My Hometown” shimmer and stomp; “Murder Incorporated” was a gritty soul-rock rave-up, while “Youngstown” got a scabrous guitar solo by Nils Lofgren that reminded you of his other gig in Neil Young’s Crazy Horse. (Springsteen’s wife, Patti Scialfa, who said in 2024 that she has cancer, wasn’t part of the band Tuesday.)

About halfway through the show, Springsteen sang “American Skin (41 Shots),” the early-2000s song about racialized police violence he wrote after Amadou Diallo’s killing by four NYPD officers; he followed that with “Long Walk Home,” which he described as “a prayer for our country.”

Bruce Springsteen

(Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)

Played back to back, the songs made you think of how little agreement we’ve come to over the last quarter-century about who gets to be called an American. The identity is always under attack, and it’s always being defended.

Anyone but a Bruce stan would admit that Springsteen leaned a little hard on recent stuff here: “House of a Thousand Guitars,” “My City of Ruins,” “Wrecking Ball” and the like.

Yet as with his speechmaking, he can still read a room. “It’s gotta be done,” he said with a grin as the band revved up “Hungry Heart,” one of a handful of old pop hits he did that broke from the evening’s topical throughline.

Near the end — in an encore that went bang-bang-bang with “Born to Run” into “Bobby Jean” into “Dancing in the Dark” — Springsteen, his shirt drenched with sweat, took a seat onstage and thanked members of the Immigrant Defenders Law Center for attending the show. (Also in the house Tuesday: Henry Winkler.)

Then he offered one final homily before closing with Bob Dylan’s “Chimes of Freedom.”

“These are hard times, but we’ll make it through,” he said. “We’re the Americans. What do they say? Americans do the right thing after they’ve tried everything else.” He shook his head as though he were running through a mental inventory.

“F—!”

FRESNO  — Four of the top Democrats running for California governor on Wednesday told a agriculture-friendly Central Valley audience that the left-leaning state’s restrictions on business and the environment have made life more difficult for farmers and should be rolled back.

The candidates onstage at the Fresno State political forum, including two Republicans, did their best to appeal to voters in the midsection of California who often feel neglected by a state government dominated by big-city politicians from Southern California and the Bay Area.

“I’m here today because for far too long, the interests of our ag economy and our rural towns and cities and communities have been second tier, if they’ve even been on the agenda in Sacramento,” said San José Mayor Matt Mahan, a moderate Democrat whose campaign has yet to live up to the high expectations it initially received.

Mahan and five others invited to the forum focused on the state’s affordability crisis, water, government regulations and other issues facing the agricultural hub — all doing their best to play up any ties to the farmers and farmworkers who are so essential to providing food to California and the nation.

Mahan recalled growing up in Watsonville, an agricultural community that is the home of Driscoll’s berries and Martinelli’s apple cider. Fellow Democrat and former U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra noted his family’s personal ties to the valley. His father picked crops along State Route 99 as a young man, he grew up in Sacramento, and his wife is from Hanford and Fresno.

Former conservative commentator Steve Hilton said his family had a small farm in Hungary, which they fled because of communism. Former Democratic Orange County Rep. Katie Porter, who grew up in Iowa during the farming crisis of the 1980s, spoke of being the descendant of generations of farmers and being a member of 4-H as well the Future Farmers of America.

“I’m not a farmer today, but I thought I would be. … I believe in the future of agriculture with a faith born not of words, but of deeds,” Porter said, repeating FFA’s creed.

The event marked the first gathering of gubernatorial hopefuls since USC pulled the plug on its debate last week. USC officials canceled the event less than 24 hours before it was scheduled to begin after facing criticism for excluding the top candidates of color. The university said it used opinion polls and financial viability to determine which candidates were invited.

Organizers of the Fresno State event invited candidates who have earned at least an average of 3% in recent polls compiled by RealClearPolitics. Along with Mahan, Becerra, Hilton and Porter, the candidates invited included former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco. State Supt. of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond and former state Controller Betty Yee, both Democrats, were not invited.

Two leading Democratic candidates were not at the Fresno State forum: billionaire Tom Steyer was scheduled to tour the polluted Tijuana River Valley in San Diego County. Rep. Eric Swalwell’s campaign cited a scheduling conflict but did not elaborate. Swalwell (D-Dublin) appeared to be doing media interviews in San Francisco on Tuesday.

Cutting gas taxes and other ways to save

California’s high cost of living is one of the most visible and pressing issues in the race to replace termed-out Gov. Gavin Newsom, and candidates pitched their plans to address it, primarily by lowering housing and energy costs.

Bianco, Hilton, Villaraigosa and Mahan have floated plans to cut oil industry regulations and suspend the state’s 61-cent-per-gallon gas tax. Bianco went further, saying he would completely eliminate the gas tax. Hilton said he would cap vehicle registrations at $71 per year no matter the type of car. Porter said her top priority is to lower housing costs by “building housing faster, building more housing, changing how we permit housing and innovating in construction and design and materials.”

Republican candidates blamed Democratic policies for the state’s high cost of living and argued that it would not be solved under a new governor of the same party. Both Bianco and Hilton pledged to gut state agencies responsible for regulating air and water quality.

“We’re never going to reduce the cost of groceries or anything else until we abandon the climate dogma that has got us to this point,” Hilton said, invoking the state’s goal to reach carbon neutrality by 2045 as a major cost driver.

According to a recent UC Berkeley IGS/L.A. Times poll, lowering the state’s cost of living was the top issue that likely voters want the state’s next governor to address. It was followed by cutting government waste and corruption — the top priority for Republican voters — and addressing homelessness.

Republicans take their shots

Wednesday’s forum was among the rare instances when Hilton and Bianco appeared before the same crowd. The Republicans have led polls for months, raising the specter of two Republicans and no Democrats appearing on the November general election ballot under California’s top-two primary system.

On Wednesday, they each tried to appeal to a more conservative-leaning audience than many other gubernatorial forums by blasting their Democratic opponents and statewide leaders.

”I think every single Democrat on this stage today should start with an apology,” Hilton said. “An apology for what their party has done to this area and this industry, stealing your water, piling on the regulations — 1,000% increase in the last decade or so, cutting the pay of agricultural workers, on and on.”

The Democrats onstage were repeatedly challenged and at times interrupted by Republican candidates who argued that electing another Democratic governor would bring more of the same problems to the region.

“You can’t just believe what’s on this stage,” Bianco said. “You have to listen to what they say in front of groups that don’t think like you, because everything that they’re saying here contradicts what they say in those groups with more cap-and-trade, more regulation, more everything else.”

Democrats talk up their experience

Democrats largely concurred on issues such as reducing regulations and increasing water supply to farmers. So they sought to differentiate themselves based on their experience and records in office.

Mahan painted himself as a pragmatist who led to San José being named the safest large city in the nation, reducing homelessness by one-third and spurring the construction of housing by reducing regulatory restrictions and fees.

“I’m accountable every day for making people’s lives better. I don’t get to make excuses and blame another party,” Mahan said. “You deserve better from Sacramento, and I’ll work with you to make sure we deliver it.”

Villaraigosa pointed to his eight-year tenure as mayor of Los Angeles, saying the city went from being the most violent big city in the country when he took office to being the safest by the time he left. He also said he took on the teachers union, which he once worked for, resulting in a 60% increase in the graduation rate.

Becerra pointed to his experiences leading the sprawling federal health agency in the Biden administration, including dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic, the wildfires that devastated Maui, Hawaii, avian flu and monkey pox.

“We do not need someone who needs training wheels,” he said.

Porter highlighted that she was the only candidate on the stage who refuses to take money from corporations and corporate PACs. The former congresswoman, who gained fame for her aggressive questioning of chief executives and Trump administration officials while in Congress, also pointed to her longtime focus on oversight.

“There are too many regulations that we are passing,” she said. “That is why I’m running for governor, to make sure that when things come to my desk, the first question is going to be, why did we need this?”

Water is for fighting

Nearly half of the forum was dedicated to questions about water policy, a complicated and politically thorny issue for Central Valley farmers and California as a whole. Most agreed the state should fast-track new reservoirs, raise some existing dams and increase water recycling to boost supply.

“We need an ‘all of the above’ solution,” Villaraigosa said. “That means we need recycling, we need [groundwater] recharge. We need dams. We need underground aquifers.”

Some Democrats, along with Hilton, continued to distance themselves from the proposed Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta tunnel, a huge project to transport water to the Central Valley and Southern California that has been tied up by legal challenges.

Bianco lambasted “environmental regulation[s] that makes weeds and bugs more important than your life,” and Hilton slammed “ridiculous bureaucracy” created by environmental laws such as the 2014 Sustainable Groundwater Management Act.

Fourth-generation tomato and pepper farmer Briana Giampaoli described herself as moderate and said she hasn’t decided whom to support for governor yet, but she was impressed by the candidates’ breadth of knowledge on water and the regulatory hurdles farmers face, particularly Hilton.

“That was really surprising, and I’m glad that both parties seem to understand that there needs to be a change in California, that something is not working,” she said. “The industry is changing as a whole across the country, and the regulations here continue to make it harder and harder to farm.”

Democrats on immigration

Democratic candidates faced a friendlier audience at the Fresno City College forum later in the day, where they unanimously expressed support for immigrant communities and said the state should fully fund Medi-Cal coverage for undocumented people. To close a budget deficit, Newsom and state lawmakers froze enrollment and raised premiums for undocumented adults on the program.

Porter and Thurmond called for Immigration and Customs Enforcement to be abolished but said, short of that, the state should monitor the federal agency’s operations in the state to protect civil liberties. The other candidates agreed; Villaraigosa pledged to ensure federal detention centers comply with all health and safety rules.

Last May, a strange thing happened on the U.S. album charts. Two metal bands (or at least metal-adjacent hard rock acts) scored No. 1 albums in the same month. The genre hadn’t seen multiple bestsellers in the same year since 2019 — and those were from veteran acts. So it was notable when the young U.K. group Sleep Token crushed on streaming and Ghost topped charts with a Taylor Swift-sized vinyl rollout. Meanwhile, avant-garde heavy rockers Deftones became unexpected TikTok darlings and arena stars.

Metal had not-so-quietly reemerged as a commercial force, and not just in the live sphere, where it’s always thrived and continues to grow. Pop culture seemed ready to welcome back a breed of hitmaker thought lost to time — the sleeve-tatted, throat-shredding hard rock star.

So the wider pop world should acquaint itself with the Virginia-born group Bad Omens, whose slam-packed Thursday night show at the Forum in Inglewood reaffirmed that they’re one of the most ambitious and skilled young bands in heavy rock, and have the star wattage and ravenous fan culture to get even bigger.

Bad Omens — with singer Noah Sebastian, bassist Nicholas Ruffilo, guitarist Joakim Karlsson and drummer Nick Folio — are not brand new. They’ve slugged it out on the metalcore and heavy rock circuit for a decade, signed to the small-ish but influential imprint Sumerian Records. But they hit their stride with 2022’s “The Death of Peace of Mind,” which melded a Weeknd-worthy R&B falsetto with rotted, churning guitars and tasteful electronics.

The band became festival headliners and racked up billions of streams, surely aided by Sebastian’s dreamboat-goth-BF good looks and striking range as a vocalist, where he veers from an ear-tickling whisper to an operatic howl and a shriek worthy of Norway in the ‘90s (sometimes on the same song, as he did on “Like a Villain”).

The band has tipped a new album for some time, though for this career-peak arena tour, it had only a handful of new singles in tow. No matter. At the Forum, the band cohered its catalog with an eye-popping stage production, one that made its case as an ultra-modern heavy rock act with the reach to be huge stars, even if they take genuine fame with some ambivalence.

That force-of-gravity was evident in the days leading up to the Forum show, where fans debated how many hours early they needed to be at the Forum to be on the barricades (the consensus — get there by breakfast). Mid-set, Sebastian pointed out one fan whom he recognized from years on the road. “You’ve been coming to see us since we sucked,” he said, laughing.

That commitment wouldn’t be possible if the music didn’t have a preternatural force to speak to current anxieties. From the first notes of its new single “Specter” — a brooding vocal workout for Sebastian that ended on pulverizing riffs — Bad Omens used cutting-edge tools and underground influence to elicit arena-rock catharsis.

One early peak of the set came when Jake Duzsik of the L.A. industrial-rock trio Health came out to duet on “The Drain,” a lurching, menacing collaborative single and a standout for both bands. Heavy-rock veterans see something compelling in Bad Omens, which helps situate the band’s pop-savvy tracks like “Left for Good” and “Just Pretend” (a platinum-selling single that wrapped up the main set) with earned feeling rather than calculation.

After the Forum show, I understood why it’s taking them so long to finish a new LP. Sebastian has been open about his mental health struggles. The band is pitched right at a difficult juncture at which their artistic ambitions abut real, life-altering attention.

They can make songs like “What It Cost” (a hooky, lecherous electro track that I’d totally believe was co-written with Max Martin if you told me) and the serrated metal that them earned them their fanbase and would cause a revolt without. It’s not easy to pair the two in a natural way. (Just ask Code Orange, once pitched as metal’s breakout stars who got bogged down in electronic experiments.) Having a K-pop-caliber devoted fanbase is great on the way up, but it’s a tense relationship.

But first and foremost, Bad Omens are gifted musicians, and whatever eldritch magic Sebastian wields onstage will always be bolstered by a serious band contorting metal, dark pop and electronic music. I saw nothing that would stop that one fan from coming back for 10 more years of Bad Omens shows, and plenty to suggest others are going to follow him.

A proposed gubernatorial forum hastily cobbled together in the hours after USC canceled its Tuesday debate fell apart because the candidates of color who were excluded from the previously planned event were unable to show up in person at KNBC-TV’s studio in Universal City, according to multiple sources.

Facing mounting pressure that its debate selection criteria excluded every candidate of color, the university canceled its debate late Monday. On Tuesday morning, billionaire Tom Steyer — a Democrat — proposed holding an alternative face-off, with KNBC moderating. But the candidates who had not been invited to the USC debate had already made other commitments.

“A lot of this came out of nowhere — there’s a debate and you’re not invited, followed by there’s no debate, and then maybe we should all hang out and have a conversation,” said Kyle Layman, a strategist advising former U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra.

USC officials declined to comment on Tuesday’s developments — as did KABC-TV, one of the broadcast partners of the canceled debate. KNBC did not respond to a request for comment, but someone involved with planning a potential debate there said pulling together such an event in just a few hours was impossible, and also unfair to the candidates who had made other plans after initially being excluded from the USC debate.

“We looked into the possibility of doing something. It just wasn’t possible because of the last-minute logistics. It was not feasible,” said the person, who asked for anonymity to speak candidly. “We couldn’t get everybody here.”

The fact that the candidates excluded from the USC debate couldn’t find a way to participate in Tuesday evening’s alternative forum irritated some people involved in the planning, however. Becerra, state Supt. of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond, former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and former state Controller Betty Yee had loudly protested not being invited to the USC event.

“This is like probably one of the last opportunities they have to be with other leading contenders of the race, so why not take this opportunity?” said someone who took part in conversations about the proposed last-minute debate, who asked for anonymity to speak openly. “If the whole thing is about bringing your message to the voters, making sure voters have as much information as possible, talking about the issues that matter, wouldn’t you want to take every opportunity to do that?

“If you’re going to talk a big game about taking your message to voters, the importance of debates, why not do it?” this person said.

Becerra, Thurmond, Villaraigosa and Yee have reportedly formed an informal pact not to participate in any debate that does not include all of them, which Yee referenced in a Tuesday afternoon news conference.

“The idea that none of the candidates of color are going to be joining a debate is just inappropriate for a state like California,” Yee said. “We also need to have a commitment from all of the debate sponsors that they will include all of us going forward.”

Yee and Thurmond were not invited to the next major televised debate, which will take place April 1 at Fresno State University. Becerra and Villaraigosa had previously confirmed their attendance, according to a news release from the Western Growers Assn., one of the event’s sponsors.

And all four candidates of color, along with San José Mayor Matt Mahan, were not invited to a debate on April 22 in San Francisco that will be hosted by KRON-TV and broadcast on Nexstar Media Group stations throughout California.

“We don’t need gatekeepers,” Mahan said in a statement Tuesday evening. “I’m calling on my fellow candidates to work together to organize our own debates — so we can take our ideas for a better California to every corner of California. Let’s let the voters truly decide.”

The scrapped USC debate was going to be hosted by the institution’s Dornsife Center for the Political Future and co-sponsored by KABC and Univision. Six candidates had been invited to participate: Democrats Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Dublin), former Orange County Rep. Katie Porter, Mahan and Steyer; along with the leading Republicans, conservative commentator Steve Hilton and Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco.

Candidates and elected officials called the criteria used to determine participation in the debate biased because it included Mahan, a white candidate who is polling near the bottom of the pack but is supported by notable names in the USC community. Hours after the debate was canceled, Steyer’s campaign sought to create an alternate event that would include all of the candidates.

“We were trying to do the right thing upon learning that the debate was canceled at USC,” said a member of Steyer’s campaign who asked for anonymity to speak candidly. “Tom immediately was like, ‘We can do something alternative.’ People want to hear from the gubernatorial candidates. It was on the table. It was offered.

“NBC couldn’t get all the candidates here, but we tried,” this person said. “Given the short amount of time we were trying to put this together, it ultimately could not happen because not all the candidates could get to the studio.”

Thurmond, who was in Sacramento and Richmond on Tuesday, joined a political influencer on YouTube Tuesday evening, while Yee attended previously scheduled events with the East Area Progressive Democrats and a women’s group in the L.A. area. Villaraigosa had lined up other interviews at his Wilshire campaign office, Becerra was traveling, and Porter was scheduled to host a livestream on her Instagram account Tuesday evening.