Bruce Springsteen the Rock Laureate and the Super Bowl

As N.F.L. executives and a television production team watched, they were tightening their miniset of four songs — dropping verses, streamlining segues — to fit their 12-minute slot as the halftime entertainment Sunday at Super Bowl XLIII, expected to reach tens of millions of viewers.

“My take on the Super Bowl?” Mr. Springsteen said after rehearsal. “Fundamentally it’s a 12-minute party.”

Few musicians anywhere consummate symbolic occasions and mass events better than Mr. Springsteen. He’s used to working on a stadium scale, and for decades his concerts have been nonstop singalongs that perfectly embody the yearning for community in his lyrics. In an era when pop hits can be as ephemeral as a deleted MP3 file, Mr. Springsteen has spent much of his career laboring to write durable songs about American dreams, from “Born to Run” to “Promised Land.”

While his latest seven-album contract with Columbia Records is worth a reported $110 million, he still comes across as a working-class guy from New Jersey, invoking a compassionate populism as he sings about jobs, families and everyday life and savors the company of his longtime buddies in the E Street Band. He has the gravitas to lead off an inaugural concert and the gusto to rock the Super Bowl. In between he released a new studio album, Working on a Dream.

Mr. Springsteen still reaches for big, symbolic statements and gets called on to make them. “Those moments are opportunities for a very heightened kind of communication,” he said.

Two weeks ago, in another nationwide telecast, he took up his longtime role as a voice of America at “We Are One,” the all-star opening ceremony and concert for President Obama’s inauguration, before hundreds of thousands of people at the Lincoln Memorial and millions on television and online. Mr. Springsteen and a choir sang “The Rising,” a song about sacrifice and redemption on Sept. 11.

At a New York City Obama fund-raiser in October that Mr. Springsteen attended, Mr. Obama said, “The reason I’m running for president is because I can’t be Bruce Springsteen.” Mr. Springsteen played “The Rising” at campaign events in battleground states, including a rally in Cleveland two days before the election.

“Once you start doing that kind of writing, it feeds off itself,” Mr. Springsteen said. “You write ‘The Rising’ for this, it gets picked up and used for that, so you end up here. If someone had told me in 2001 that ‘you’re going to sing this song at the inaugural concert for the first African-American president,’ I’d have said, ‘Huh?’ ” He laughed.

“But eight years go by, and that’s where you find yourself. You’re in there, you’re swimming in the current of history and your music is doing the same thing.”

He continued: “A lot of the core of our songs is the American idea: What is it? What does it mean? ‘Promised Land,’ ‘Badlands,’ I’ve seen people singing those songs back to me all over the world. I’d seen that country on a grass-roots level through the ’80s, since I was a teenager. And I met people who were always working toward the country being that kind of place. But on a national level it always seemed very far away.