Featured photos by David Brendan Hall and Joshua Mellin

It’s not terribly unusual for musicians to have lyrics to their songs on stage with them, just in case they forget a line or lose their place. Seriously, next time you go see a show from a long-standing act, look for the sheets of paper taped at their feet or notice if they keep turning pages in a binder — that’s them checking their words. Fancier artists might even use a teleprompter, which begged a question to Ryan Adams at a recent show in Seattle: What if Bruce Springsteen was looking at something else in that teleprompter?

(Read: Top 25 Albums of 2017 (So Far))

What started as a goofy riff of thought quickly became one of Adams’ famed improvised songs, this one we’re calling “The Bruce Springsteen Teleprompter Song”. Maybe the Boss is just reading a book while singing “Born to Run”, or perhaps he’s even pumping his own autobiography into his in-ear monitors during “Thunder Road”. When you think about it, he could really be doing anything up there and we wouldn’t know it. “He says, ‘Fuck all the words, go out and buy my a VCR tape of Aliens/ Technically Alien 2,” Adams sang while his band followed along. “He goes, ‘I can do whatever I want when I’m singing/ Nobody would be the wiser.’”

Check out footage from a Facebook Live stream of the performance above.