Roll of the Dice: Chasin’ Wild Horses

At last: the dice lead us to Bruce Springsteen’s latest and finest album, Western Stars.

Seven months after its release, with the benefit of distance, catalog comparison, and deep and repeated listens, I can confidently rank Western Stars at the very pinnacle of Bruce’s officially released catalog.

Born to Run may be a more important milestone; Darkness on the Edge of Town may have brought us a legendary tour; Tunnel of Love may reveal the artist at his most vulnerable. But Western Stars is unrivaled in songwriting and musical craftsmanship, and in years to come I trust that it will receive its due recognition.

Western Stars is a deeply romantic and emotionally vibrant album. I’ve heard some call it depressing, even nihilistic–but respectfully, I would argue the opposite: Western Stars is uplifting, a tribute to life lived. There’s a theme to be found at work in Western Stars, but we have to look beyond its American West imagery and not allow our lens to be overly filtered through our knowledge of Bruce’s chronic depression.

Released shortly before his 70th birthday (and recorded some years prior), Western Stars introduces us to a handful of characters late in their lives. They’ve made mistakes, as have we all, and to varying degrees of success they dedicate themselves to moving forward regardless, as do we all. That’s the theme of Western Stars in a nutshell: living your life when the road ahead is so much shorter than the road already traveled. If we are each the sum of our life experiences and decisions, how do we continue to grow and move forward while carrying the weight of them?

Over the next few years, we’ll explore each and every track on the album, from the carpe diem “Drive Fast (The Stuntman)” and the achingly beautiful “Moonlight Motel,” both of which I rank in Bruce’s top ten best songs ever, to what is perhaps the happiest and most romantic song Bruce has ever written, “Hitch Hikin’.”

But today we’ll start with the album’s literal centerpiece, “Chasin’ Wild Horses.”

We’ll break it down in a moment, but as with every track on Western Stars, we need to first take a deep, close listen to fully appreciate the subtlety and artistry at work. If you have headphones available, take them out and listen:

“Chasin’ Wild Horses” is the tale of a man trying to outrun his past or to at least banish it from his mind’s eye. But as we all know from having tried it, attempting to suppress the memory of your mistakes or losses is like… well, chasing wild horses.

“Chasin’ Wild Horses” is also a prime example of Bruce’s skill as an arranger: he deploys his studio musicians deftly and skillfully, with such precision and nuance that the backing track tells as much of the story as Bruce’s lyrics. (This is another common element through the album.)

The introduction features Bruce plucking idly at his acoustic guitar, while a viola establishes a scene that quickly fades into the background as Bruce’s vocals draw us into his narrator’s deceptively ambivalent musing.

Guess it was something I shouldn’t have done
Guess I regret it now
Ever since I was a kid
Trying to keep my temper down is like
Chasing wild horses, chasing wild horses
Chasing wild horses

There’s a lot of information packed into this introductory verse, the most significant of which is that our narrator possesses a fair amount of self-awareness and yet hasn’t yet come to terms with his self-knowledge.

Bruce’s use of the word “guess”–twice–isn’t accidental. This verse is essentially a musical shrug; the narrator is fully aware that he’s battled his fierce temper throughout his whole life, and that he’s lost more than a few battles in an ongoing war.

What exactly was it that he did but shouldn’t have? We never learn, but we get the strong impression that it’s just one act in a long list. Bruce introduces the title metaphor here; he’ll use it four times throughout the song, each time in a different sense (including one that’s literal). It’s just one of the many masterful touches Bruce applies. Here he uses it to convey both how hard he’s struggled against his own nature, and how futile that war often is.

In the next verse, we learn that whatever our narrator’s running from, it brought him to Montana, where he works for the Bureau of Land Management literally chasing and corralling wild horses, a job so physically taxing that it successfully keeps him from dwelling on his past… for the most part.

I left my home, left my friends
I didn’t say goodbye
I contract out to the BLM
Up on the Montana line
Chasing wild horses, chasing wild horses

There’s a musical structure at work so far: each verse begins on an up note (with a melody reminiscent of “Your Own Worst Enemy“), but each subsequent line ends on a downer.  By the end of the second verse, Marc Muller’s pedal steel enters, painting the exterior scene and drawing us out of the narrator’s reverie across a deliberately monotonous bridge that represents the physical tedium that serves as a substitute for solace:

We’re out before sunup
We’re in after sundown
There’s two men in the chopper
Two under saddle on the ground
In the evenings we hop in the pickup
Head into town for a drink
I make sure I work till I’m so damn tired
Yeah way too tired to think

That last couplet is important–notice that Bruce says “I make sure I work till I’m so damn tired.” That’s the giveaway that he uses his work as a drug, a way of numbing himself from facing the pain he’s caused to himself and others.

And if “Chasin’ Wild Horses” is skillful to this point, this is the point where it becomes masterful.

Notice how Bruce holds the moment after the “way too tired to think” line. It immediately draws us back into the narrator’s psyche, and when the full orchestra enters a beat or two later, the musicians represent the past come crashing into the present. Now, finally (and ironically given the lead-in), we glimpse the woman at the center of his lost love.

You lose track of time
It’s all just storms blowing through
You come rolling ‘cross my mind
Your hair flashing in the blue
Like wild horses, just like wild horses
Just like wild horses

We only see her hair, but to the narrator it stands out against the blue sky like the manes of the horses he spends the day with–and instantly, we know that whatever effectiveness his day job has offered in suppressing his regret, it’s vanished forever more. (The use of equestrian imagery in particular strongly suggests that “Chasin’ Wild Horses” is a sequel to “Dry Lightning,” so similar are its narrators.)

The orchestra swells now, anchored by repetitive piano riff (presumably Ron Aniello) that creates the effect of an emotional whirlwind that catches us up in it, along with the narrator with whom we are now inseparably bound.

My favorite part of the song comes next, as past merges with present in a way that’s very reminiscent of “Reno,” another Springsteen masterpiece.

A fingernail moon in a twilight sky
I’m riding in the high grass of the switchback
I shout your name into the canyon
The echo throws it back

Go back and listen to this part of the song again. Put your headphones on, and turn the volume up as loud as you can stand, and when the narrator shouts his love’s name into the canyon, listen… listen, as the echo throws it back. “Back…. back…” It’s so faint that I have to believe that Bruce knew that 99% of his listeners would completely miss it, and yet it’s such a lovely moment. Bruce allows it to breathe before he brings us crashing back to the present.

The winter snow whites out the plains
Till it can turn you blind
The only thing up here I’ve found
Is trying to get you off my mind
Chasing wild horses, chasing wild horses
Chasing wild horses, chasing wild horses

In this last verse, Bruce drives home both the titular metaphor and the narrator’s quixotic futility. The winter weather literally snow blinds him, and the work itself keeps his mind from drifting back to his lost love, but as we learn through the simple word “you,” his love is never far from his thoughts.

He’ll keep trying to distract himself, but he’ll never fully succeed. He’s rooted in place now, forever chasing wild horses but never catching them. The orchestra swells again, and the whirlwind returns at the four-minute mark, overwhelming us with love and loss, before we finally compose ourselves as the pedal steel carries us back to reality. The orchestra, though, never really exits–the strings linger in the background, reminding us as the song fades away that we can never fully escape that which we run from.

To date, Bruce has only performed the songs on Western Stars a single time, at a secret (at the time) concert that would be eventually released as a feature-length motion picture and soundtrack album.

The film version of Western Stars received much-deserved praise, but I’d argue that not every song translates well from album to stage. “Chasin’ Wild Horses” is a case in point–it loses some of its subtlety in translation. The orchestra in Bruce’s barn is too powerful to deliver the full range of emotional impact that the album version achieves. The emotional twister of a coda is a bit too strong (the horns drown out the more gentle piano), and the echo of the canyon is completely absent.

Still, there’s nothing like hearing Bruce’s music brought to life by a full orchestra, and if the performance pales by comparison to the album, it’s only because the album is such perfection already.

Bruce has been coy when asked whether we’ll ever hear any of the Western Stars songs played on an E Street stage, and I have to admit I have mixed feelings about that. There are songs that would probably translate well, and those that almost certainly would not.

“Chasin’ Wild Horses” is in the latter category. It’s a perfect song, perfectly situated on a perfect album, and perhaps that’s where it should remain.

Chasin’ Wild Horses
Recorded: Unknown
Released: Western Stars (2019)
First performed: April 2019 (exact date unknown) (Colts Neck, NJ)
Last performed: April 2019 (exact date unknown) (Colts Neck, NJ)

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