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Running on Empty
Watch These Days
On a solo acoustic live album that came out earlier this year, Jackson Browne
makes his audience an offer. “I could sing you a really tender song filled
with despair,” he deadpans, “or a really weary song laced with hope. What’s
your pleasure?” His chuckle underlines that the question is more
self-mocking than self-reverential, but Browne’s followers crowned him king
of both styles more than 35 years ago, and they hear no reason for him to be
deposed in 2008. To some, he has the misfortune to represent some
time-warped embodiment of the sun-kissed Californian troubadour. Such an
idle supposition is mocked by an artist who still combines confessionals of
universal resonance with, let’s be old-fashioned about this, protest songs.
His new album, Time the Conqueror, a first studio release in half a dozen
years, has him singing in cheery celebration of his long-term relationship
with the artist Dianna Cohen. But it also has him railing against the
American government’s response to Hurricane Katrina, on Where Were You, the
hypocrisy of its cultural embargo, on Going Down to Cuba, and what he sees
as the brazen lawlessness of its foreign policy, on The Drums of War.
In an apathetic age, only Neil Young among his original peers still
consistently sounds any musical alarm against injustice and corruption.
Browne agrees with Gore Vidal’s assessment that America’s largest political
party is the “nonvoting party”, so such opinionated motivation is nothing
short of admirable. Don’t ask me, ask Randy Newman. On the ever-laconic
Newman’s new album, Harps and Angels, a song called A Piece of the Pie
mischievously measures America’s collective languid self-interest against
the undimmed commitment of one man. “The rich are getting richer, I should
know,” he writes. “While we’re going up, you’re going down, and no one gives
a shit but Jackson Browne.”
So, is Browne the last protest singer? “He didn’t really say that,” he says of
Newman’s portrayal. “What he said was even funnier, that no one else gives a
shit. Not true, of course, but very funny. My friend Don Henley referred to
[the actor] Ed Asner, who’s active for social change, and Henley called it
the Dreaded Asner Syndome. I guess I’ve contracted it, and am proud to be
afflicted. I don’t think there’s any choice but to throw in with those
people who are doing what they can to make the world inhabitable and
beautiful. I’m a card-carrying member of hedonists for peace. I just don’t
think peace and prosperity should only be for the wealthy.”
We’re in the middle of a relaxed but stimulating three-hour chat in Santa
Monica, near Browne’s home, about his work and a wider world many musicians,
especially rich and established ones, forget to engage with. His invective
against the Bush regime on The Drums of War has particularly sharp claws. “I
began figuring out how to say this around the time the Iraq war began,” he
explains. “It’s a chance to turn the tables on the people who’ve done so
much to subvert the constitution and the rule of law.”
This is more than benign idealism, as John McCain recently discovered. Browne
is suing the Republican campaign, seeking damages of $75,000, for using his
1977 song Running on Empty in an “attack” ad against Barack Obama, in the
apparent belief that a lifelong liberal would either not mind or not notice.
“They broke two very clear laws,” he says calmly. “That they can’t use your
song without your permission, and that they can’t imply you endorse a
candidate if you don’t. Either they don’t know the law or they think they’re
above it. Either way, it speaks volumes about the style of governance.”
Browne has given $2,300 in support of Obama’s presidential campaign,
according to public record.
“McCain’s campaign [managers] are trying to say he knew nothing about the ad,”
Browne adds. “Do we believe that? It may be that it plays well to his
constituency to steal my song, unapologetically take whatever you feel like
using, and work out the details later. I’m sure I’ll prevail, because the
laws are clear-cut, but I think the Republicans have a culture of impunity.”
Now three weeks off his 60th birthday, a bearded Browne may be looking just a
little older at last. As in a similarly long dialogue at the time of his
2002 album, The Naked Ride Home, however, he is likeably low-key. “The
inspiration’s not a problem,” he says. “I’m not less inspired, I’m less free
to shut myself away long enough to finish a song. I’m also not in a hurry.
That’s the odd thing that’s happened, that there’s less and less time left,
and I’m less in a hurry. Maybe I’ll get desperate towards the end. You want
the things you sing about to be about life and other people’s lives, and if
I shut myself away and tried to ramp up the output, it might limit the
interest I take in things that are pretty universal.”
Browne has written several of the most elegantly sorrowful songs of our times,
often born of undiluted despair. In 1976, just as he was beginning work on
what became his first multi-platinum album, The Pretender, his wife,
Phyllis, committed suicide with an overdose of barbiturates, leaving Browne
to raise his son, Ethan, little more than a year old. That album’s Sleep’s
Dark and Silent Gate, and subsequent musings on personal loss such as In the
Shape of a Heart, remain in his live set today. One wonders how he can bring
himself to sing them.
“I tell you why it doesn’t present a problem, because it’s somehow reassuring
to go back and encounter some sorrow,” he explains. “I’ve thought about it
many times. Once it’s a song, it’s like a room in which things happen. You
can go in there and lift objects up and examine them. Just by virtue of the
fact that you can leave again, it’s somehow comforting to sing a sad song.
Last night, I went to see Patty Griffin, who sang a song that really
affected me, and everybody else. A sigh escaped as we began to put our hands
together, and I started to look at the people next to me, who I’d just met,
but I thought I might cry if I did. For some reason, you feel gratitude at
being brought in touch with your emotions.”
Nevertheless, Browne dismisses the idea of misery always being the
songwriter’s best company. “There’s a long-held belief that you’re going to
write the best stuff only if you’re miserable, but that can’t be right,” he
laughs. “I think it’s really easy to write sad songs. To express your
happiness or gratitude is more of a challenge, and to write a wildly happy
song, or one that makes you happy, is a worthy goal. But you can’t pretend,
so you have to deal with all this stuff as it comes up. Some of these new
songs are somewhat playful. Any song I write for my girlfriend is pretty
playful.”
Browne met Cohen after a very public split from the actress Daryl Hannah. In
his younger years, he was said to have had affairs with Joni Mitchell, Laura
Nyro and Nico, each of whom provided creative inspiration. During his
teenage dalliance with the German singer in New York, he wrote the
extraordinarily precocious and enduring These Days.
“This is one of the longest relationships I’ve ever been in – it’s 15 years or
something,” he muses. “Of course, you put two or three of those together and
you’ve got a lifetime.” The partnership is celebrated anew on Just Say Yeah,
“a chance to talk about how we came together. It’s kind of a continuation of
my song My Stunning Mystery Companion [from The Naked Ride Home], because
it’s about the same person”.
Increasingly depicted as the erstwhile poster boy of the Laurel Canyon
songwriting generation, Browne finds the image overromanticised by recent
books. I put it to him that the mythologising might be a British combination
of admiration for and jealousy of a perceived lifestyle of sun, girls and
drugs. “I know there’s not much sun in England,” he smiles, “but there have
to be girls and drugs. I don’t know why Laurel Canyon is so romanticised. It
was a part of Los Angeles that had trees, and the weather was really great.
There were clubs, and everybody showed up at each other’s houses, but isn’t
that just like every other scene? Everybody had a great sense of allegiance
generationally, through the music. People really believed they were going to
change things. The fact that it became subverted by the money is pretty much
human frailty.”
Yet, in an altogether different California, Browne endures. He recently took
both his sons, Ethan and Ryan, to see Radiohead. “It was the most riveting
experience, but at the same time a technical tour de force, in the middle of
which was this incredible contact with the music and the players.
“Vulnerability and confidence go hand in hand. The coin of the realm is
intimacy, whether you can do it for 20,000 people or 800 people.”
Time the Conqueror is released tomorrow on Inside Recordings. Jackson Browne
will tour the UK in March and April 2009
