“Where Rainbows Never Die” by The SteelDrivers

Album cover for “Reckless” by The SteelDrivers.

It is a rare song (or songwriter) that can level its gaze at death and, rather than conjure denial or confrontation, evoke golden landscapes rippled with ecstatic nostalgia. “Where Rainbows Never Die” by The SteelDrivers does just that. A rich, warm fingerpicked melody blossoms with slide guitar. Glittering banjo and ascendant fiddles carry lead singer Chris Stapleton’s gritty and soulful vocals into a nearly hymnal chorus. But there’s no religious specificity to the lyrics, and this isn’t the doctrine of a musical preacher.  

At once confessional and transcendent, “Where Rainbows Never Die” follows the journey of an old man toward death. A common enough theme, but what sets this story apart is our narrator’s absolute lack of regret or fear. 

“I’m an old man now, I can’t do nothing,

Young folks don’t pay me no mind. 

But in my day, I sure was something, 

Before I felt the heavy hands of time.” 

The first verse paints a picture of someone who, at the end of life, has accepted that what they loved about living is no longer available to them. Rather than longing for a miraculous return to vitality, they have cast their gaze forward into the unknown with an astonishing confidence revealed in the chorus: 

“I will make my way across the fields of cotton 

And wade through muddy waters one last time. 

And in my dreams I come out clean 

When I reach the other side, 

West of where the sun sets 

Where rainbows never die.” 

Chris Stapleton, former singer/songwriter of The SteelDrivers.
Photo credit: Shawn Miller/Library of Congress.

Decades of sunshine and farmland, riversides and the wildness of youth are folded into these lines, invoked by the vamping instrumentation, distilled by emotive vocal harmonies. There’s an undercurrent of sadness, but it’s a sweet sorrow, like the lullaby of a warm night at the end of summer, or the last dance of your wedding reception. We’re not given images of angelic harps and cities in the clouds; we’re given the stuff of life. The things that made our narrator’s life his, and worth experiencing. The things that, once lost, untether him from the need to cling to his body as he feels it shutting down. 

“I’ve got one last thing to do, 

One more mile before I’m through 

Casting off these earthly chains 

Going where there’s no more pain.” 

This is a song for the living and the dying. A song for long drives across open countryside and candles lit after midnight. A song for the grieving and for those who have never known loss. “Where Rainbows Never Die” reaches for something universal, human and ineffably true, and finds it. Luckily for us, it’s been recorded with every note and every word in precisely the right place.