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Wikipedia Summary for Jackson Browne
Clyde Jackson Browne (born October 9, 1948) is an American singer-songwriter and musician who has sold over 18 million albums in the United States.
Emerging as a precocious teenage songwriter in mid-1960s Los Angeles, he had his first successes writing songs for others, writing "These Days" as a 16-year-old; the song became a minor hit for the German singer and Andy Warhol protégé Nico in 1967. He also wrote several songs for fellow Southern California bands Nitty Gritty Dirt Band (with whom he was briefly a member in 1966) and the Eagles, the latter of whom had their first Billboard Top 40 hit in 1972 with the Browne co-written song "Take It Easy".
Encouraged by his successes writing songs for others, Browne released his self-titled debut album in 1972, which spawned two Top 40 hits of his own, "Doctor, My Eyes" and "Rock Me on the Water". For his debut album, as well as for the next several albums and concert tours, Browne started working closely with The Section, a prolific session band that also worked with a number of other prominent singer-songwriters of the era. His second album, For Everyman, was released in 1973, and while it lacked an enduring single, has been retrospectively assessed as some of his best work, appearing highly on several "Best Album of All Time" lists. His third album, Late for the Sky, was his most successful to that point, peaking at number 14 on the Billboard 200 album chart, and earning Browne his first Grammy nomination for Album of the Year. His fourth album, The Pretender, continued the pattern of each album topping the previous by peaking at number 5 on the album chart, and spawned the hit singles "Here Come Those Tears Again" and "The Pretender".
It would be the 1977 album Running on Empty, however, that would be his signature work, peaking at number 3 on the album chart, and remaining there for over a year. Both a live album and a concept album, the songs on the album explore the themes of life as a touring musician, and the album was recorded both on stage, and in places touring musicians spend time when not playing, such as hotel rooms, backstage, and in one case on a moving tour bus. The album produced two Top 40 singles, "Running on Empty" and "The Load-Out/Stay", and many of the other tracks became popular radio hits on the AOR format.
Successful albums continued through the 1980s, including the 1980 album Hold Out, his only number 1 album, the non-album single "Somebody's Baby", which was used in the film Fast Times at Ridgemont High, and 1983's Lawyers in Love, which included the hit single "Tender Is the Night". In 1986, he released Lives in the Balance, which had several radio hits and included the introspective "In the Shape of a Heart", which was inspired by the suicide of his first wife a decade prior. His string of hit albums came to an end at that point, as his next several albums failed to produce a gold or platinum RIAA rating.
He released two compilation albums, The Next Voice You Hear: The Best of Jackson Browne in 1997, and The Very Best of Jackson Browne, released in conjunction with his Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction in 2004. His most recent studio album is 2021's Downhill from Everywhere, the follow-up to 2014's Standing in the Breach, which included the first fully realized version of his song "The Birds of St. Marks", a song he had written at age 18. In 2015, Rolling Stone ranked him as 37th in its list of the "100 Greatest Songwriters of All Time".
My forays into trying to date girls my own age from the school I went to were all pretty tortured.
Talk about celestial bodies.
Famine and disaster, right there in front of you, and the more you watch, the less you do.
Self-discovery in songwriting, bringing something forth that's instructive to yourself -- some of the best songs that you will ever write are the ones where you didn't have to think about any of that stuff, but nonetheless that's what's happening in the song.
I was doing my best Bogart, but I was having trouble getting into her jeans.
Eleven on a scale of ten, honey, let me introduce you to my redneck friend.
Hunger in the midnight, hunger at the stroke of noon
Hunger in the banquet, hunger in the bride and groom
Hunger on the TV, hunger on the printed page
And there's a God-sized hunger underneath the questions of the age.
Rock me on the water
Sister will you soothe my fevered brow
Rock me on the water
I'll get down to the sea somehow.
Coffee in the morning, cocaine afternoons.
I'm losing touch with reality and I'm almost out of blow. It's such a fine line, I hate to see it go. Cocaine, runnin' all 'round my brain.
The high ideals and promises you once dressed the future in are dancing in the embers with the wind.
You would think with all the genius and the brilliance of these times, we might find a higher purpose and a better use of mind.
Let the music keep our spirits high, let the buildings keep our children dry, let creation reveal its secrets by and bye.
Say it isn't true
That there always has been and always will be war
Say it isn't true
And apart from all the fine things that man has struggled for
Say it isn't true
There always has been and always will be war.
How long can you hear someone crying -- how long can you hear someone dying -- before you ask yourself why?
Take it easy, take it easyDon't let the sound of your own wheelsDrive you crazy.
Lighten up while you still can, don't even try to understand. Just find a place to make your stand, and take it easy.
Don't confront me with my failures, I had not forgotten them.
I've been aware of the time passing by they say in the end it's the wink of an eye and when the morning light comes streaming in you'll get up and do it again.
You've had to struggle, you've had to fight
To keep understanding and compassion in sight
You could be laughing at me, you've got the right
But you go on smiling so clear and so bright.
Forget what life used to be, you are what you choose to be. It's whatever it is you see that life will become.
Looking out at the road rushing under my wheels. Looking back at the years gone by like so many summer fields.
More than a career, I feel that I've got a function. I see things in a much more holistic way. Some people bake the bread, and some people write the songs.
No matter how fast I run, I can't get away from me.
That folk music led to learning to play, and making things up led to what turns out to be the most lucrative part of the music business -- writing, because you get paid every time that song gets played.
I'm sensitive, you know, about some things, and as some of my partners could attest to, incredibly insensitive.
Out into the cool of the evening strolls the pretender. He knows that all his hopes and dreams begin and end there.
Say a prayer for the pretender, who started out so young and strong only to surrender.
Oh Lord, are there really people starving still?
You measure peace with guns, progress in megatons. Who's left when the war is won?
When you turn out the light, I've got to hand it to me. Looks like it's you and me again tonight Rosie.
In the end, they traded their tired wings for the resignation that living brings. And exchanged love's bright and fragile glow for the glitter and the rouge, and in the moment they were swept before the deluge.
Now, guitar was pretty cool. Everybody knew something on the guitar. So I wanted to play guitar, but I told my dad if he wanted me to keep studying something, Id like to study piano.
It's just.... you know.
You can take as much as you can from the generation that has preceded you, but then it's up to you to make something new.
When I really started liking music was when I could play some of it myself, and after a couple of years of playing folk music, I kinda rediscovered those hits that were on the radio all the time when I was a kid.
So what I do, more than play any instrument -- I mean, I love to play -- but more than that, I write songs. Songs that are about living, about what it's like to be going through all the things that people go through in life.
That's maybe the most important thing each generation does, is to break a lot of rules and make up their own way of doing things.
I taught myself to play the piano, because I wanted to play it.
I've written many extra verses to songs that I learned to sing -- an extra verse about a friend, or just add some verse -- and that led to writing my own songs.
Musician jokes are a kind of joke that usually have to do with how much money someone makes. Musicians are always starving, so they're really mean to each other about who makes what.
It was a great time to be born, because I got to have my own publishing company right from the beginning, so I made more money than somebody would have doing what I did ten or fifteen years before.
I started playing the trumpet when I was about eight.
And my dad wanted me to play the trumpet because that's what he liked. His idol was Louis Armstrong. My dad thought my teeth came together in a way that was perfect for playing the trumpet.
Also, right at that particular time in the music business, because of people like the Beatles, people began owning their own publishing. I'll just say this really quickly -- they used to divide the money for the music that was written in two, just equal halves.
English people are so trapped in this class paradigm.
Very often it's really inconvenient -- who you fall in love with. You can't really control it.
As far as those kinds of things, I also played at the concert to call for the release of Nelson Mandela when he was a political prisoner in South Africa. We were celebrating his 70th birthday and calling for his release.
I've also gotten to play in front of a million people in Central Park when there was a grass roots movement calling for nuclear disarmament -- it was about 1982 -- they called it Peace Sunday.
I wrote the song For A Dancer for a friend of mine who died in a fire. He was in the sauna in a house that burned down, so he had no idea anything was going on. It was very sad.
I grew up reading Shakespeare and Mark Twain.
I get some heat for what English people call 'overproduction.' I don't think my older stuff was overproduced, but I do think that sound has dated.
Music itself is a great source of relaxation. Parts of it anyway. Working in the studio, that's not relaxing, but playing an instrument that I don't know how to play is unbelievably relaxing, because I don't have any pressure on me.
Like, What is the least often heard sentence in the English language? That would be: Say, isn't that the banjo player's Porsche parked outside?
So I had a couple of years of playing trumpet. I really enjoyed it, but it was not the kind of instrument you could whip out at a party. Let's face it.
The idea that I wrote something that stood for the way I feel about things, and that it lasts, that's probably my favorite thing that I've done.
I'm a big fan of British journalists like 'The Independent's Robert Fisk, but it's hard to find voices like his in the U.S.
We have an open society. No one will come and take me away for saying what I am saying. But they don't have to, if they can control how many people hear it. And that's how they do it.
I told my father I wanted to play the banjo, and so he saved the money and got ready to give me a banjo for my next birthday, and between that time and my birthday, I lost interest in the banjo and was playing guitar.
I never was a very good singer.
Right around the end of the fifties, college students and young people in general, began to realize that this music was almost like a history of our country -- this music contained the real history of the people of this country.
I love to read. I love to stretch. In the morning, I get up, and if I'm not in a hurry, I will lie on the floor on a rug, look through some books and magazines, and maybe listen to music and try to do stretching exercises to tune up.
No matter how close to yours another's steps have grown, in the end there is one dance you'll do alone.
I'd have to say that my favorite thing is writing a song that really says how I feel, what I believe -- and it even explains the world to myself better than I knew it.
The biggest influence? I've had several at different times -- but the biggest for me was Bob Dylan, who was a guy that came along when I was twelve or thirteen and just changed all the rules about what it meant to write songs.