As we celebrate Jackson Browne’s 70th Birthday today, we pick our 10 favourite songs from the man’s wonderful catalogue. It’s a surprisingly small catalogue – he’s only released 14 studio albums in a career spanning some 46 years – but for Jackson Browne it’s always been about quality over quantity. Here we go, in chronological order of recording.
 
“Rock Me On The Water” (1972)

For someone with a reputation for making pretty laid back and easy going music, Jackson Browne sure has an eye for the apocalyptic. Written in the midst of early environmental concerns, “Rock Me On The Water” could be the soundtrack for a documentary about Global Warming.  “Well the fires are raging hotter and hotter / But the sisters of the sun are going / To rock me on the water now” he sings, in search of relief. And he knows we all must share the blame:  “Oh people, look around you / The signs are everywhere / You've left it for somebody other than you”.  And it’s set to a plaintive melodic sound  - not country, not folk, not Tin Pan Alley, but a pure 70s pop-rock – that would come to define the Californian sound as it was later heard on everything from “Rumours” to “Excitable Boy” to “Damn The Torpedoes”.   Jackson would return to the apocalyptic concerns on 1974’s “Before The Deluge”.  

“Take It Easy” (1973)

The ultimate Californian anthem, and a perfect early 70s rock song, “Take It Easy” is better known as an Eagles hit, but Jackson co-wrote it and no one sings it better. It kicked off his 1973 album For Every Man, and for all the joy suggested in lines like “It’s a girl my lord in a flatbed Ford/slowing down to take a look at me”, it’s very much a song of someone who might soon be running on empty. “Don’t let the sound of your own wheels drive you crazy” is the expression of someone driven to distraction by self-awareness, and perhaps in search of a little bit of oblivion. Check out this great acoustic version with David Lindley.

“These Days” (1973)

Jackson has clearly always been an old soul. How else could have a written a song like this – or even with this title - at the age of 17? A product of his brief Greenwich Village days in the late 60s, the song was first recorded by German chanteuse Nico – who 18 or 19-year-old Jackson was in a relationship with at the time – on her first solo album Chelsea Girl in 1967, which came not longer after the landmark The Velvet Underground & Nico album. For someone so clearly associated with California – and who’d already briefly played in country-rock pioneers the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band – Jackson Browne left a surprising mark on New York, injecting a little bit of melodicism into the austerity. Here’s a more recent version of the song performed live and alone on Jools Holland.

“Late For The Sky” (1974)

Beautifully, warmly melodic, the title track of Browne’s third album takes a microscope to a failed relationship in a clear-eyed and  - in lines like the opening “The words had all been spoken / And somehow the feeling still wasn't right /And still we continued on through the night”  - unflinching manner. Like so many songs on this album, there is no clear verse/chorus delineation; the song is just a series of ebbs and flows and with no clear markers it could be 3 minutes long or it could 10 minutes long. It just brings you in and takes you along. It’s a deceptively dark album, and one that made Browne’s artistic presence again felt in New York; Martin Scorsese included this tune in Taxi Driver, and friend and fan Bruce Springsteen has called it a “masterpiece”. With its piano-driven melodies and plaintiveness, you can certainly hear its influence on the quieter songs on Springsteen’s own dark classic “Darkness on the Edge of Town”.

“For A Dancer” (1974)

Another melody so poignant and lyrical that the lyrics – so obtuse on paper – seem to make perfect sense even if the overall tone of the song – it seems to veer between optimism and fatalism and life and death at the change of a verse  - is hard to pin down. David Lindley’s aching fiddle line takes this to the next level – on the record and on this 1976 live version.

“The Pretender” (1977)

Many a fan’s favourite and with a sing-along refrain that belies the song’s subject: one man’s realisation that he  - and everyone? -  is a fake and a phony. By now it could be seen that Browne’s supposedly laid-back approach to the song was more a reflection of an existential crisis than simple idleness. 

“Running On Empty” (1978)

Jackson’s second great rocker – see “Take It Easy” for the first – and another one with car metaphors, “Running On Empty” is an exhilarating toe-tapper, and perfect for cranking out loud with the windows down. But like so much of Browne’s material, the vibe is deceptive (even if the title is not.)  Exhaustion and fatigue never sounded like fist-pumping fun as much as it does here.   

“Somebody’s Baby” (1982)

A little bit of light relief. This classic hits radio fave – recorded for the soundtrack of Cameron Crowe’s very Californian Fast Times At Ridgemont High film - starts off in Yacht Rock territory and is probably the one song that is actually as light as Jackson’s knockers think he is in general - but damn if it isn’t a neat pop song. 

“Lives In The Balance” (1986)

The title track of Browne’s 1986 album; an album which found the artist wilfully alienate a substantial portion of his audience with some striking songs that expressed a left-wing political bent and a serious outrage at America’s covert dealings in Central America and the state of his nation under Republican president Ronald Regan. The track is a stark rocker with Central American instrumentation and a dark seriousness that left no doubt that Browne was laying it all on the line. His songs have maintained a strong political and social conscience ever since. Here it is performing it with David Lindley, David Crosby and Stephen Stills.

“The Dreamer” (2017)

While his album output has slowed to one-album-in-sixteen-years levels, Jackson still releases occasional new music, and this track from last year is a good one. Again strongly political and with ethnic influences and instrumentation, “The Dreamer” is a beautiful song for immigrants facing uncertainty and deportation in a land they’ve made their home in. Check out the video.

Listen to all of Jackson Browne's catalogue on Spotify...