Everyone knows Jackson Browne's big hits. We can all sing along with the song he co-wrote for the Eagles—”Take it easy, take it easy. / Don't let the sound of your own wheels drive you crazy”— and many of us at a moment's notice can harmonize with “Tender, tender is the night / Tender, and the benediction of the neon light.” Catchy stuff. But despite Browne’s earlier popularity and critical acclaim, his musical style, 1970s California rock, is not taken too seriously today. We tend to write him off as a member, if not a don, of the “Mellow Mafia”—a perpetrator of faux-folk, classic rock radio fodder.
A couple of years ago my brother-in-law made a case for Jackson Browne as more than that—a troubled genius, writer of concept albums, closer to Dylan than to the Doobie Brothers. He claimed that although not all of his albums hold up well under scrutiny, some of them really transcend the genre. On his advice I bought several of Browne's early albums. The one I keep coming back to is 1974's Late for the Sky. In the first side’s four songs, Browne creates a religious vision rarely seen in popular music.
In the opening (and title) track, Browne begins by reflecting on his own need for epiphany: “How long have I been sleeping? / How long have I been drifting alone through the night?” Organ music, almost inaudible in the background, reinforces the sense of spiritual longing. But we are far from a church; this is a song of a romance gone wrong, a case of mistaken identity. “I don't know what you loved in me,” he says; “Maybe the picture of somebody you were hoping I might be.”
This line invokes a major theme of the album, that of appearance versus reality. Specifically: memories, images, and photographs—and the dreams they represent—versus the difficulties of becoming an adult. Browne is slowly, sorrowfully waking up to the latter: “How long have I been dreaming I could make it right / If I closed my eyes and tried with all my might / To be the one you need?” Sentimental, no doubt, but for an adult listener, the feeling is all too recognizable. The song echoes Thomas Hardy's poem “The Voice,” which begins: “Woman much missed, how you call to me, call to me, / Saying that now you are not as you were / When you had changed from the one who was all to me, / But as at first, when our day was fair.”
On the second track Browne sings of a “Fountain of Sorrow”—perhaps alluding to William Cowper's hymn about a “fountain filled with blood,” but with a twist of hippy comradery and a bit of T.S. Eliot-style regret. The first eight lines, my favorite stanzas in the entire album, merit reprinting in full:
Looking through some photographs I found
inside a drawer
I was taken by a photograph of you
There were one or two I know that you would
have liked a little more
But they didn’t show your spirit quite as true—
You were turning 'round to see who was behind you
And I took your childish laughter by surprise
And at the moment that my camera happened to find you
There was just a trace of sorrow in your eyes.
Browne's literary arsenal here includes inversive wordplay (“taken by a photograph,” “took your childish laughter by surprise”), ballad-like rhyme (a true ballad only rhymes the second and fourth lines), and ballad-like meter (in which the first lines of couplets are always longer then the second). This declining form corresponds to the poet's sense of decline in the relationship and in himself.
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