And at 8:30 in the morning, no less. Not the typical Today Show outdoor concert:

The Plaza was packed for the unprecedented live concert on TODAY, with many people camping out overnight to get prime viewing locations.

And Springsteen didn’t disappoint, launching into songs even before the show began its broadcast at 7 a.m. EDT and continuing on and off for the next couple of hours, playing multiple encores, and being what he’s always been – arguably the best live performer in the business.

Lauer looked over the vast crowd and asked Springsteen what he thought of so many coming out so early to hear him sing.

“This is the same crowd you get for the dancing bears. They show up for anything,” Springsteen joked. Then, simply and humbly, he added, “I appreciate it.”

Later, addressing the crowd before another song, he quipped, “I must want to sell some records bad to be up here this early.”

At 58 years old and four years after the band last played together on tour, Springsteen has reunited the band first formed in the early 1970s, when he was a kid growing up poor with big dreams on the Jersey Shore. Their new album, “Magic,” acclaimed as a return to his musical roots, is being released on Tuesday, Oct. 2, and the band is starting a tour of the United States and Europe – their first in five years – on the same day in Hartford, Conn.

Watch videos of the concert here.

In a New York Times article, A.O. Scott quotes from a recent interview with Bruce Springsteen:

“I wanted one thing on the record that was the perfect pop universe,” Mr. Springsteen said, once the band had wandered off and he had finished an early lunch of granola with fresh fruit and soy milk. It was two days before his 58th birthday, and he looked trimmer and tanner than he had the last time I’d seen him, which was on the JumboTron video screen at Giants Stadium a few years back. “You know, that day when it’s all right there; it’s the world that only exists in pop songs, and once in a while you stumble on it.”

Not that “Girls in Their Summer Clothes” is untouched by melancholy. Its narrator, after all, stands and watches as the girls of the title “pass me by.” “It’s the longing, the unrequited longing for that perfect world,” Mr. Springsteen continued. “Pop is funny. It’s a tease. It’s an important one, but it’s a tease, and therein resides its beauty and its joke.”

And much of “Magic,” on first hearing, seems to unfold in a similar spirit. There is a brightness of sound and a lightness of touch that are not quite like anything else Mr. Springsteen has done recently. In the past five years he has released four albums of original material, a zigzag through new and familiar styles and idioms. “The Rising” (2002) brought the E Street Band back into the studio after a long hiatus (their sound updated by the producer Brendan O’Brien) and answered the trauma of 9/11 with the defiant, redemptive roar of solid, down-the-middle rock. With “Devils and Dust” (2005) Mr. Springsteen picked up the thread of Western stories and acoustic ballads that stretched back through other non-E Street projects like “The Ghost of Tom Joad” and “Nebraska” (as well as some parts of “The River”). “The Seeger Sessions,” released last year, was an old-time old-lefty hootenanny, with a big, unruly jug band rollicking through spirituals, union songs and Dust Bowl ballads.