Roll of the Dice: Silver Palomino

I still see my dad every day.

Our parents fill so much space in our hearts and our lives that anything and everything can remind us of them, even when they’re gone. Like my dad.

I see him every time I drive past a Rita’s Ice, where we used to go on hot summer nights. (They’re pretty much everywhere back home.) I hear him any time someone tells a groan-inducing “dad joke.” (My sense of humor gets more like his with each passing year, my daughters tell me.)

And still, a full three months after his passing, at least once every day my mind tugs at me: Call Dad. You haven’t spoken to him in a while. And in those moments, I feel the ground shift beneath me, a daily aftershock of loss.

Those are just moments, though.

Most of the time I’m okay, because I had a lifetime to prepare for this. I remember how terrifying the idea of death felt as a child when I first came to understand it; you probably do, too. But as we grow and age and live, death becomes less frightening. We learn to expect it and plan for it, and we adapt to the idea of it.

Loss and grief still come calling, and they are no less powerful when they knock. But though the ground may shift beneath us, we have built our homes on a solid foundation. We stand.

At least, that’s how it works when people leave us when they’re supposed to: late in life, affairs settled, words spoken.

But what about when people leave us too soon? When parents pass early, their children’s loss must be unimaginable. When we’re that young, our parents are our world, and when they die, our world ends with them.

Nothing is stable anymore, nothing reliable. Every step is shaky and unsure, the ground constantly shifting. This is the unsteady foundation of “Silver Palomino.”

On September 4, 1996, Rumson resident Fiona Williams-Chappel died of heart failure at the age of 37.

Fiona was a fashion stylist for musicians like Sting, The Rolling Stones, and Bruce Springsteen. She was also the mother of two young boys, Tyler and Oliver, who happened to be friends with Bruce’s sons Evan and Sam, only six and two at the time.

The families were close enough that Fiona had been living in Bruce and Patti’s guest house on their farm property, which is where Fiona was found unconscious before being swiftly rushed to Riverview Medical Center, declared dead only ten minutes later.

To bear witness to that kind of loss at close range, to look at your own small children and imagine them experiencing that world-breaking grief and fear and loss… if you’re a songwriter with a deep well of empathy, I imagine the only way you can process it is to express it in song.

In “Silver Palomino,” Bruce introduces us to a young boy whose mother, like Fiona, died too young. At thirteen years old, our narrator is considerably older than the real-life boys he proxies for, but it’s an age young enough to feel the same powerful grief yet old enough to express it in more adult language.

By way of coping with his loss, our narrator imbues a majestic, untamable silver palomino with his mother’s soul. In the horse’s regal and free spirit, he keeps his mother alive and feels her with him still.

I was barely 13 years old
She came out of the Guadalupe’s on a night so cold
Her coat was frosted diamonds in the sallow moon’s glow
My silver palomino

Sixteen hands from her withers to the ground
I lie in bed and listen to the sound
Of the west Texas thunder roll
My silver palomino

I track her into the mountains she loved
Watch her from the rocks above
She’d dip her neck and drink from the winter flows
My silver palomino

Our mustañeros were the very best, sir
They could never lay a rope on her
No corral will ever hold
The silver palomino

In my dreams bareback I ride
Over the pradera low and wide
As the wind sweeps out the draw
‘Cross the scrub desert floor

I’d give my riata and spurs
If I could be forever yours
I’d ride into the serrania where no one goes
For the silver palomino

Through this point in the song, we don’t yet realize that the palomino is anything other than a wild horse. But as the song progresses and his description grows in adoration, it becomes clear that this animal represents something more powerful and primal for the narrator.

It’s not just the lyrics that send a signal, though–Bruce says a lot through his cadence and lost-in-memory strumming. (Bruce plays every instrument on the track except for the strings, which were overdubbed years later.) He swallows syllables, words, and eventually complete phrases to the point that they’re inaudible, as if overcome with memory and treading on unsteady emotional ground.

“There’s bars missing and things in the music,” Bruce admitted to Renee Montagne in a 2005 interview for NPR. “In this particular song, there’s only a couple of chords, and it’s almost a recitation to music… You can’t predict the bar pattern. It creates a sense of instability, and I think that’s why it feels right. That’s where the child is at the moment. He’s had this crushing loss, and he’s entered into this other world through this horse. When I tried to make it in a regular time, it stiffened the song and you lost the character.”

He’s right, and it’s why “Silver Palomino” is one of the best examples in his catalog of Bruce’s song-crafting sophistication.

It’s at this point that the song takes a narrative turn, as our protagonist gives into memory and relives his last moments with his mother.

Summer drought come hard that year
Our herd grazed the land so bare
Me and my dad had to blowtorch the thorns off the prickly pear
And mother, your hand slipped from my hair

That moment of finality, where his mother’s hand slips from her son’s hair as she takes her leave of this world, is set against a backdrop of drought, barrenness, and thorns–a world suddenly full of peril at the very moment he loses his guardian. The memory is indelible, for him and for us.

The final verses of “Silver Palomino” are as fine as any Bruce has ever crafted. The boy is older now, and he’s learned how to move forward in life. Light has returned to his world–light provided by the spirit of his mother, who still travels near him, if not with him.

As strings swell, Bruce fills his lyrics with argent imagery, creating a world of pearl sky, pale stone, white snow in the forecast, bright stars above–an otherworld of beauty in the color of his mother’s spirit.

Tonight I wake early the sky is pearl, the stars aglow
I saddle up my red roan
I ride deep into the mountains along a ridge of pale stone
Where the air is still with the coming snow

As I rise higher I can smell your hair
The scent of your skin, mother, fills the air
‘Midst the harsh scrub pine that grows
I watch the silver palomino

As for our narrator, he rides in red, the color of blood and life, a nightly visitor into the spirit world, where his mother waits for him each night. He feels her presence and conjures her scent from memory. And even as he takes note of the harsh terrain underneath him, he communes with the palomino, and for at least a few minutes, he is safe in the loving spirit of his mother.

Bonus: Bruce performed “Silver Palomino” frequently during the Devils & Dust Tour (including once when Tyler Chappel was in the audience in Albany), but not at all since. Here’s one of his best performances, captured on film on the tour’s opening night.

Silver Palomino
Recorded: 1996-97 (core recording), 2004 (strings)
Released: Devils & Dust (2005)
First performed: April 21, 2005 (Asbury Park, NJ)
Last performed: October 28, 2005 (Boston, MA)

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