Ocean reign
First album in seven years from the quintessential California singersongwriter and environmentalist. By Sylvie Simmons.
Jackson Browne
★★★★
Downhill From Everywhere INSIDE RECORDINGS. CD/DL/LP
THERE’S ALWAYS been a seriousness to Jackson Browne – right back to the mid ’60s when a 16-year-old surfer boy wrote These
Days, a song whose preternatural literacy, depth and reflection would go on to define the West Coast singer-songwriter movement. Ironically it would take a while before Brown – signed as a songwriter, not a singer – got to join that club. But he ended the 1970s with a run of hit albums – and also a free concert to protest a nuclear power plant. Ever since, environmental activism and human rights causes have played a serious part in his life and music – his previous album, 2014’s
Standing In The Breach, being one of the finest examples of that personal/political fusion.
The follow-up, Browne’s 15th LP, has 10 new songs and many fewer collaborators. The original plan was to release it a couple of years ago to mark his 70th birthday, but you know. (Browne actually caught Covid when playing a benefit concert). The title might suggest an old guy grumbling that the world’s gone to hell in a handbasket, but it’s less passive and more specific than that. The title track is about plastic trash polluting the oceans, while the transgressive reign of Trump provided plenty of ammunition for other songs.
However, listen to opener Still Looking For Something and you might think it a forgotten Browne song from the ’70s: soulful midtempo West Coast rock with the kind of romantic rock lyrics that Bruce Springsteen – inducting Browne into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame – said he wished he had written. “I’m out here under the neon, baby/Still looking for something in the night/I don’t mind giving up something/You don’t get something for nothing.”
There are some anthemic rockers – the ’70s Stones-esque Until Justice Is Real is good, the strident backing vocals not so much – but most of the album’s highlights are the midtempo or slower songs. Minutes To Downtown: reflective and beautifully crafted, about love, life and time. A Little Too Soon To Say: a classic Browne ballad. “I want to see you find your way/Beyond the sirens and the broken night/Beyond the sickness of our day”. A Human Touch – co-written with Leslie Mendelson for an upcoming documentary about an early AIDS clinic and sung with her as a duet – is another beauty. The Dreamer – co-written with David Hidalgo (Los Lobos) and Eugene Rodriguez (Los Cenzontles) and sung in English and Spanish – is a tender South
Of The Border-esque ballad about the US deporting a Mexican girl.
“The walls that we’ve built between us,” Browne sings in that warm, familiar voice, “Keep us prisoners of our fear.” This is an album about inclusion, he says. And humanity. Here’s to humanity. Seriously.