Ghost of Tom Joad Tour

The Ghost of Tom Joad Tour was a worldwide concert tour featuring Bruce Springsteen performing alone on stage in small halls and theatres, that ran off and on from late 1995 through the middle of 1997. It followed the release of his 1995 album The Ghost of Tom Joad.

The tour represented Springsteen's first full-length, solo tour; he traveled with only an instrument technician and a sound engineer. As such it was a marked departure from the high-energy shows with the E Street Band that Springsteen had become famous for. The album itself was quiet, dark, and angry, and Springsteen presented it as such in the shows on the tour. Older songs from Springsteen's catalog, such as "Born in the U.S.A.," were presented in very different, often harsh re-arrangements.

The result, especially in the tour's first leg of shows, was an uncompromising portrayal of pessimism; Jon Pareles of The New York Times said that with the tour's performances, Springsteen "has taken his music to an extreme, a depressive's view of tedious, unending woe." Greg Kot of the Chicago Tribune wrote that "In contrast to past tours, which have been celebratory events tinged by introspection, Springsteen brought a sobering sense of solitude" to the shows of this tour. By some of the later shows of the tour, however, Springsteen relaxed the mood a bit by interweaving a few new songs with an almost comedic bent.