Bruce Springsteen delivers at Nashville concert

Bruce Springsteen sat on the stage at Bridgestone Arena Thursday night, flipping through a stack of posterboard and paper scraps.

They were handwritten signs made by members of his Nashville audience, which Springsteen had personally collected as said audience carried him from the middle of the arena to the lip of the stage — all while he sang along to his hit "Hungry Heart."

Scrawled on these signs were song requests, declarations of love for Bruce and members of his band, and boasts of just how far they'd traveled to see what was almost certainly not their first Springsteen show. But another sign — with a simple question — caught his eye.

"Is 48 too old to dance?"

Springsteen read the sign out loud, and didn't wait a moment to answer.

"No! It's not."

Proof of that was found all over Bridgestone Arena on Thursday during the New Jersey rock veteran's first Nashville concert in nearly five years. Most obviously, there was the 64-year-old force of nature at center stage, sweating - but never flagging - through a three-hour set filled with fist-raising anthems.

But there were also the diehards of all ages in the crowd, shouting along with each verse like they were the ones front of that microphone, and it didn't go unnoticed.

"You've been a great, great, great crowd for us, every time we've come down here," Springsteen told them "...When you come out and see people up on their feet all night, man, that inspires you."

A fire seemed lit under the group from the start of the show, as the Nashville concert took place just one week after E Street - which includes part-time Music City bassist Garry Tallent - was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. And the band continues to evolve: new guitarist Tom Morello is best known for founding alt-rock titans Rage Against the Machine.

In their hands, classics like "Badlands" and "Born to Run" are fun and faithful, but it's newer tunes like the worldly, soul-stirring "High Hopes" (which opened the show), "Death to My Hometown" and "Shackled and Drawn" that keep them — and the crowd — on their toes.

And then there's their age-defying frontman, who's still leaping atop a piano, dropping to his knees at the start of "Tenth Avenue Freeze Out" and pulling every other move that's made his concerts the stuff of legend over the last 40 years. Throughout the night,, he made loops from the stage to a catwalk at the center of the arena, giving high-fives and hugs to fans and even stopping for a few "selfie" photos in the stands.

Another surefire way to keep things spontaneous: invite your youngest fans to sing on stage with you. That's a move Springsteen made repeatedly on Thursday (and it's one you'd see at nearly all of his shows).

When a middle-school-aged girl held up a sign requesting the band play The Rolling Stones' "Satisfaction," Springsteen brought her up to sing along, and let her keep the tambourine she'd been given to play. Another boy with a thousand-yard stare was recruited to strum along on guitar during "Dancing in the Dark," prompting Springsteen to say, "That's a serious man!" And even when a quartet of girls couldn't quite find enough gusto to sing "Waitin' On a Sunny Day," he gave each a twirl, had them take a bow, and sent them off with smiles.

The grown-ups got their parting gift soon after: a killer stretch of hits to close out the evening, including the surprisingly rare "Born in the U.S.A.," plus "Born to Run," "Dark," "Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out" and a gloriously wacky cover of the Isley Brothers' "Shout" to close the proper set. Springsteen remerged solo to play a stunning acoustic version of "Thunder Road," the song that kicked off his 1975 commercial breakthrough album "Born to Run," after sharing a few more kind words for Music City and the show's charitable partners, Second Harvest Food Bank of Middle Tennessee.

"They're on the front lines, doing good work," he told them. "Once again, thank you for coming out and seeing us. There's such great crowds here in Nashville, over our last series of tours, and we've been at it a little while. We appreciate the years and years of support and dedication to our music, and to our band."