16 minute read
Nashville Skyline ByAnne McCue
THINKING ABOUT EVERYMAN
Advertisement
Everyone is familiar with the trajectory of Jackson Browne’s career over the past half century, from his association with Nico and the The Eagles and the whole Southern California rock scene, a string of great albums to kick off his catalogue, starting with the self-titled album of 1972, For Everyman and Late For The Sky in the two years following and through to his huge Top 5 albums such as The Pretender and Running on Empty in the late ‘70s. It was arguably one of the finest sequences of albums released by any solo artist. Then there was the No. 1 album Hold Out in 1980 and World In Motion and I’m Alive in 1993. Los Lobos have recorded a version of ‘Jamaica Say You Will’, off Browne’s debut album, for their latest recording Native Sons, a reminder of just how good Browne’s song writing was even in his early twenties. “I thought it was really beautiful, really nice,” says Browne when we catch up on Zoom. “They’re a great band. They’re great. Such great musicians and so creative.” A few days before our interview, I found an old Zig Zag magazine from January 1977 with an interview that revealed even more about Browne’s early years: that he started playing the trumpet, he played with the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band for six months or so then went to New York where he not only met Nico (who recorded his songs) and took over a bar gig from Tim Buckley. Browne also recorded a demo for Elektra Records (which he says was ‘terrible but which has become a rare collector’s item). Browne also joined a project with two others called Paxton Lodge which Elektra hoped would become something like Crosby, Still and Nash but eventually turned into a group that called itself Baby Browning. “When I came back from New York, we talked Elektra Records into giving us a remote recording situation in the woods in Northern California,” recalls Browne. “The reason we were able to talk them into it was Big Pink, simply the most groundbreaking, the most sort of powerful roots but progressive and really amazing music. [It was] on the basis of the idea that if you got a house in the woods, you might come up with something great. We talked them into it. But we got into all kinds of mischief. That became a recording facility for Lonnie Mack and for Spider John Koerner and Dave Ray. It didn’t really gel. We were all individual players and everybody played the way they played. In our band there were three songwriters or more and two or three really great guitarist, but we didn’t have the acumen. We didn’t have the record-making experience, and there was just a lot of crazy stuff going on, a lot of getting high. Not just us but the producer was the highest of them all.” Eventually, Elektra had Ry Cooder try to salvage an unsuccessful recording project that the label admitted was a mistake. By this time, Browne had moved back to Los Angeles and was living in the community in Echo Park that would eventually lead to his success. I suggest that many songwriters these days don’t have the same extensive apprenticeship in music prior to recording an album. When Browne finally got his first record deal from David Geffen he was famously told to take the entire summer to prepare his songs and just think about making an album! “I don’t know,” responds Browne. “I think all musicians really struggle They do all kinds of things to develop. My going to New York was combined with my being kind of just a freak like a hippie. Going to New York was part of kind of a pilgrimage. It wasn’t really about going to try to make anything happen. I think something might happen at any time but I didn’t know what. It was total luck that I got the job, accompanying Nico.” It was a fertile period but when I suggest to Browne that he could write a memoir, as so many of his contemporaries have done, he laughs and say, ‘I can’t write a postcard.’ “I talk my head off,” he adds. “Over time, a number of times, there have been people who made a case for it and have been very persuasive, but I like writing so much that I would have to become a better writer to do it.” It is surprising that Browne is so self-deprecating about his own writing but while he is not yet prepared to write a memoir he certainly pours himself into his songs, examining the state of his own heart and the world in general. Even in the past decade, when his output has slowed a little, Browne’s albums had a habit of throwing up memorable moments. However, his latest album is what some might call a return to form, if he had been out of form, and one of his finest of the past 20 years. As he approaches his 73rd birthday, Browne has not only spent some time thinking about his own mortality but also about the future of the planet and the human race. Even on his early albums he asked the big questions and he was involved in the No Nukes movement, but now the concern has gone from the potential damage of war but the actual damage we are doing to ourselves. “On the surface, it’s about living in L.A.,” said Browne in a press release about the new album with its intriguing title of Downhill From Everywhere and an ominous inside cover shot. “But it’s really a metaphor for life itself. “I adore this city, but I’ve been trying to leave since around the time I finished my first album. You can love and appreciate and depend on a life as you know it, but deep down you may also long for something else, even if you don’t know what it is.” The new album was completed during the pandemic after Browne suffered a health scare when he and his son caught Covid-19 and had to cancel an extensive national tour with James Taylor. (The rescheduled 29-date tour kicks off again in late July and runs through to November). “What’s happening for everybody, of course, is a huge concern,” he replies when I ask how he is. “My own particular health was not ever so bad. It was not bad. I wasn’t really sick. I could tell I was getting better and not getting worse.” Browne began recording the new album in his Groove Masters Studio in Los Angeles prior to the pandemic but needed to finish it later in 2020. >>>
After nearly fifty years, Jackson Browne is still writing songs that touch our hearts and guide our lives.
By Brian Wise
>>> “I didn’t have a finished album,” explains Browne. “I needed another couple of months to finish but we had to stop and wait. I think I waited at least four months before I could record the last song and then begin to overdub, finish vocals, and in some cases, I made some changes in what I recorded before the pandemic. I was able to take my time really. In a way, the pandemic was a gift of a kind of calm, that clarity.” Over the decades Browne has been fortunate to record and tour with some amazing musicians. The studio band that he has assembled for this album is no exception: it is basically your touring band with pedal steel maestro Greg Leisz and guitarist Val McCallum along with bass legend Bob Glaub, Jeff Young on keyboards, Mauricio Lewak on drums and Pete Thomas and Davy Faragher. Other guests include Leslie Mendelson on ‘A Human Touch,’ Mexican singers Los Cenzontles on ‘The Dreamer’ (a song about immigration) and Phoebe Bridgers on the video for ‘My Cleveland Heart.’ The musicians are able to hit that classic groove that imbues so many of the songs and makes them so memorable. “The band that’s on this record developed over a period of time,” says Browne, “but also I’ve gone out for whole tours with Greg Leisz. The cool thing about this band is Greg and Val really have a great chemistry. They play off of each other incredibly well and it happens spontaneously all the time. Neither of them play the same solo twice but they listen to each other and support each other to the same degree always. It’s really a great band for me because the songs stay fresh.” So, nearly fifty years on from his debut album, released in January 2022, how does the song writing process compare these days with when he was younger. Theoretically, it should be easier, isn’t it? “Sometimes, it’s easy especially if you get a subject or you get something that you haven’t written about before,” explains Browne. “It gives itself to you to explore. A couple of songs in this album were written in a short amount of time and some of them are written over a long period of time. It varies. I think it’s really hard if you’re trying to express ideas that are developing. There’s no flashpoint for the feeling you have about it. It’s just a gradual understanding of the situation. In the case of ‘Downhill From Everywhere’, that’s something that I was involved in - ocean conservation and marine-protected areas. I went to the Galapagos and took part in the TED conference. I had a gradual awareness about the health of the ocean. The information about the ocean was dire but that was a long time ago. To try to put into words, what you’re feeling and thinking about something like that is a challenge because songs are not easy to give information through and get a lot of information out. “There has to be some emotional flashpoint and, in this case, it was hearing this phrase from the oceanographer, Captain Charles Moore, that “the ocean is downhill from everywhere.” A phrase like that gives itself to a song and then writing the song was not so linear. It’s not really a linear exposition about the health of the oceans but rather juxtaposing and contrasting images from a modern life in which everything you do impacts the ocean. Everything we do, everything we consume winds up in the ocean. Everything that’s plastic stays around a lot longer than everything that’s wood. You’ll see that every single thing you do involves some form of consumption of plastic. I like the idea of stringing images together without trying to hammer a point home trying. It’s there if people hear it.” “The plight of the ocean has been going for a long time and there are organizations and scholars and ocean advocacy groups that had been fighting for the health of the ocean for a long time,” replies Browne when I mention that Americans are starting to think about the wider world after four years of near isolationism and devaluing of science. “It wasn’t about the last four years but those last four years, I think, showed us what can happen if you have somebody in flagrant disregard for every standard and for every impulse to do with preserving the natural world. You can see how much damage can be done in relatively short period of time. I think we have the illusion that as a society, we are moving forward and that we are getting somewhere. That is really a dispute you’d have to really question that now.” As is the practice these days, some of the songs have been released – as the equivalent of singles - in the months leading up to the album. One of those songs, ‘A Human Touch’ features the great young singer Leslie Mendelson. The song appeared in the documentary 5B about the San Francisco General Hospital AIDS Ward during the early ‘80s. The film’s director, Paul Haggis, suggested Mendelson to Browne. “He heard that as a duet,” says Browne, “and it was one of those great intuitive, cinematic ideas but he guessed really right. Leslie just started writing the song with Steve McEwan. When they had something that they liked, they’d sent it to me to see if I wanted to add anything or if I want to sing it. I was really knocked out with what they had. I thought, ‘Wow!’ because Steve is a great writer; he writes a lot of songs in collaboration with people who then record them. He was set up to work that way. I had never really done it. We became really fast friends. We really became good friends. I love these two dearly and they both live in New York. I got to hang with them in New York. I got to hang with them in New Mexico once.” “Leslie has really got a wonderful stage presence,” he continues. “She’s comfortable. What can I say? She’s comfortable opening for The Who with acoustic guitar. This is badass. She is true as a singer and just really charming and funny and just at home. She’s at home on stage. People adored her.” “When I write, I cross-examine myself a lot,” says Browne about his writing. “I argue with myself about whether what I’ve said makes sense or whether or not people are going to get what I’m talking about. I really sort of examine it. I did that with some of Steve’s lines then I changed a couple of his lines but really the result was that what he had written just worked. “That song is not just about an AIDS ward. It’s really about something more universal. It encapsulates the whole argument that the right has with the left about gay rights. If you wanted to change, you could. You’re gay because you just decided to be gay and you could change. You could heal yourself, come to Jesus. Whereas where gay people say, ‘I’m the way I am. I’m the way God made me, the same way you’re the way God made you.’ That thing gets laid out so economically in the first couple of lines. I sing the same lines as a heterosexual. It means the same thing. I love this song for the universality of what’s said and especially some of the most moving lines to me like, ‘Everybody wants a holiday. Everybody wants to feel the sun, get outside and run around. Live like they’re forever young.’ I love that. That gives me chills and Steve wrote that.” To emphasise the scope of the new album’s material, ‘The Dreamer’ features Mexican singers Los Cenzontles, in what has been a constant theme in what’s been a theme in American folk music dating back to even before Woody Guthrie sang about it. “I’m glad what you said about it being an issue for many years,” responds Browne, who wrote the song with Eugene Rodriguez, “because Woody Guthrie wrote ‘Deportees’ about the migrant workers that were killed in a plane crash in the ‘40s how even then they were just called ‘deportees’. They were being deported for not having the proper papers. People come from Mexico for the same reasons people come from Norway. My grandmother came from Norway. She came for a better life. The farm she grew up in I couldn’t support six children and the oldest brother inherited the farm and everybody else had to go find something else. My grandmother came here when she was 16. “The girl in the song came here when she was 12 and I actually know her. When I met Eugene, I showed him a song that I had tried to get started quite a few years ago, probably 30 years ago, and it was about vigilantes on the border personally enforcing the immigration laws. To do that and just say it was to promote law and order, of course, is absurd and ironic. I thought it was a good basis for a song but I could never get it going because it really wasn’t about people that I admire. When I met Eugene and showed him the song he began writing these lines about the girl that was on the session with us, with David Hidalgo, and the two singers in Los Cenzontles. “I love that Australia has had its waves of immigration,” he continues, bringing the subject closer to home. “I’ve read a couple of really great op eds in Australian papers about the need for immigration and the value that immigrants have brought to your country as well. There’s no doubt about it. It’s really a transfusion of new blood and of new DNA. It’s just so absurd that there’s this xenophobic fear. “Growing up in California, I’ve known Mexican-American people my whole life. My earliest friends were Mexican. I always felt a deep connection with Mexican culture.” Browne has obviously spent a lot of time over the last few years thinking about some really big issues which spill out and dominate the songs on Downhill From Everywhere. “It’s what I read about,” laughs Browne. “I read a lot. I don’t read to try to put stuff in the songs but I’m interested in it. I also listen to radio like public affairs on the radio. One of the great public affairs radio shows in the United States is a former Australian named Ian Masters. I think he’s from a family of journalists in Australia. You guys, your journalism is really strong. We have some strong journalists too, but I asked Peter Garrett one time how he got so political. He said he came from a family of lawyers and he said, ‘In my family, if you spoke up to say anything at the dinner table, for instance, you really had to back up what you’re talking about. You had to know your stuff.’ I think there’s that seriousness in Australia and in Australian journalism and especially in politics. That might be a big generalisation but I know it from my Australian family too. This is seriousness that I really admire.” Browne has recently been quoted as saying, ‘I see the writing on the wall’ and ‘I know there’s only so much time left in my life, but I now have an amazing, beautiful grandson, I feel more acutely than ever the responsibility to leave him a world that’s inhabitable.’ “In the opinion of Paul Hawken, the great environmentalist and writer, we’re experiencing one of the greatest mass movements in the history of humanity which is the many-faceted, many-pronged effort to save the planet and to save our world,” says Browne. “My oldest son tells me, “This is what we’re good at. This is what humans are actually good at, at recognising some danger and then finding some way around it. I think it’s getting very late, and we might not have the same world we want or the same world that we have grown up thinking is our ideal planet. Indeed, Hawken says, ‘We’re not just heading for the precipice. We’ve gone over it and we are in free fall and now, it’s a matter of mitigating the consequences and dealing, managing what’s happening to the planet, and what’s happening to our species’.”
Downhill From Everywhere is available on July 23 on Inside Recordings.
