JACKSON BROWNE
An Inconvenient Truth From Greenwich Village to LA’s Troubadour and beyond, JACKSON BROWNE has always written songs about love, hope and defiance – but with his new album Downhill From Everywhere these themes have taken on a bold, new urgency. “I’ve always been connected with people who are trying to make things better,” he tells Rob Hughes. Photo by NELS ISRAELSON
ACKSON Browne hasn’t had much sleep. “Last night I was playing until three in the morning,” he explains, via Zoom, from the tastefully appointed kitchen that adjoins his home studio in Los Angeles. “I’ve been working on a song for a movie and you have to sort of chase it where it goes. It’s so great, because I’ve got this place where I can come at all hours. It’s next to my writing room, where I have a mattress.” The convenience of having his own studio, for a perfectionist like Browne, also means there’s a temptation to meddle. Downhill From Everywhere, his new album, should have been out earlier this year, but he heard a few things on the test pressing that he didn’t like. “So I bought myself the time to do some little changes and experimenting,” he says. “That’s happened over the years, but there’s always that moment where you finally have to let go.” We’re primarily here to talk about the album, which is as insightful, melodic and artfully measured as anything Browne has put his name to in the past 25 years. But the course of our two-hour conversation follows all manner of digressions and tangents, from the people he’s known –Tim Buckley, Nico, Warren Zevon, the Eagles, Lowell George and more – to activism, legacy, songwriting as therapy and starting out solo. He even calls back a couple of weeks later, to clarify something he feels may have been open to misinterpretation first time around. 86 • UNCUT • JULY 2021
