Jackson Browne - Downhill From Everywhere

That’s really interesting. I’d probably choose “Late For The Sky” given the two. It was obvious when I’m Alive was released that “Sky Blue and Black” was a major song. Over the years, I started to have problems with the production on I’m Alive, which dampened my initial enthusiasm for it overall. When the acoustic version of “Late For The Sky” came out, it drew out the melody and poetry of the song apart from the original production where I think a lot was lost.

In its original version, I would have had trouble placing it over the other big tracks on Late For The Sky, but as a ballad on piano, shorn of the production, it is obvious that “Sky Blue And Black” strikes a balance between the dense poetry of those earlier songs but with more focus and ultimately accessibility. So I can see it being neck-and-neck with “Late For The Sky”, specifically because it isn’t one of Jackson’s lengthy and intricate discursions into his and/or others’ psyche such as “Fountain Of Sorrow” or “For A Dancer”.

If I had been voting I probably would have ended up with “Fountain Of Sorrow” being my top pick.

The two Solo Acoustic albums, and Love Is Strange, are a great gift to the fans if for no other reason that they allow us to hear many of Jackson’s eighties and nineties songs unadorned with the production choices he made on the albums. It’s as if “seventies” Jackson came back from the past and performed those songs.

 

I know that this will seem weird for me to admit, but I love music that makes me tear up, so I'll revisit the "I'm Alive" album with what you wrote in mind.

Funny conversation a few weeks ago with a group of friends, when we were talking about a then upcoming Jackson Browne/James Taylor concert nearby and how one couple bought last minute (and the most expensive) tickets still left. As usual, I'm there sitting dumbfounded when the guys wife says "I don't know any songs by Jackson Browne". She's 65, if she's a day and she doesn't know ANY frickin' Jackson Browne songs and you just paid TOP DOLLAR to see him??? I truly will NEVER understand peoples fascination with going to any concert, by any artist, just because it exists!?! Then, another wife there decides that she will now play the "DJ", looking for Jackson Browne songs on her cell phone via Spotify, which was a nightmare within itself. They all know that I'm sitting right there (a forty plus year radio personality, who LOVES music more than anyone they know and yet they don't seem to want to use my talents, LOL). So, after she hits about six wrong artist songs and three commercials on that goofy Spotify app, she finally lands on "Take It Easy" by The Eagles, which I say is "close", as Jackson wrote that one. Of course, everybody wants to say that I'm wrong, so I keep whispering songs for her to look for ("Runing On Empty", "Doctor My Eyes" or "Somebody's Baby") and she just keeps getting anything but. She says they don't seem to have those songs, which I know that they must. (NOTE: If I would have had my iPad Pro with me, I could have played thirty songs by now, as I have all of my mobile music in that thing). When she finally lands on "Somebody's Baby", everybody goes "oh yeah!" and I sit there thinking, "oh my GOD, these people haven't got a clue". I mean, if "Somebody's Baby" is your gauge for "great" Jackson Browne, then I kind of feel sad for you. That song is one of my all-time least favorite songs and YES, I've seen "Fast Times At Ridgemont High" and that may be the reason why? Thank you again Steve Jobs, for making everybody think that they are DJ's with their damn phones!!!

 

are you aware that jackson browne only played 10 songs at that blossom show?

and thanks for having an open mind about 'i'm alive' 'sky blue and black' might be my favorite jackson browne song. and while you are listening, keep in the mind that she collected ceramic angels.

 

Will do and yes, I saw the set-list from the Blossom show and I was shocked that he only played that many songs, as I'm sure that they wanted more. I also caught that he and James did "Take It Easy" together, which might have been fun?

 

Have you played it? I need to give it a clean but some noise in places. I think it may be plated at Pallas and pressed at Furnace as packaging looks to be USA. If it doesn't improve may get an exchange from Amazon.

 

I have played it and my copy is excellent. I have an instance of very slight noise at the very end of the second track on Rec 1 Side 2 and the same on Record 2 Side 2, as these songs fade out. The noise however is a thing of nothing and I am perfectly fine with it. At least no 'non fill' or other such defects! The records are centred as well and flawless except as noted. The records were 'commissioned' (or whatever it is these 'intermediaries' do these days) via Furnace but the pressing is done at Pallas in Diepholz in Germany, as far as I know. My one and only experience of Furnace U.S. vinyl, a few years ago, had 'non fill' so I would not buy anything they pressed. My JB records were 'wet cleaned', rinsed and then ultrasonically cleaned before they were played. This makes an enormous difference and I have a complete absence of surface noise, pretty much, as a result. Of course, there is every possibility that you got a bad copy. That seems to be common these days. My recent Grateful Dead 'Skulls & Roses' reissue was pretty much flawless except for spots of 'non fill' across 3 tracks (some of the best tracks too) on Side 1 of Record 2 and I returned it. It's a €40 release. I have 'vinyl anxiety' every time I buy a new record in this vinyl era.

 

Have ordered a replacement copy.

 

I really like the 4 or 5 tracks I've heard but for the title track which sent me downhill fast. My Cleveland Heart seems both clever and lighthearted, especially considering the topic. Stems from its fear of artificial in place of 'real' - part of the message in the song seems often clear.

I like the opening track even more. Still have some more songs to hear for the first time.

A 6min+ song with 'Love' in title got my ear and stayed there.

 

Jackson Browne: Downhill from Everywhere review – voice of the boomers faces his mortality
The Guardian


Lovin' it today! A very strong effort...we have been lucky to get really strong releases by the old timers we have stayed with for over 50 years (eg. Tom Rush, John Prine, Leonard Cohen, David Crosby). Definitely not novelty acts as so many have become. --LK






Still regarded as the most artful of 1970s west coast singer-songwriters, Browne frets about the environment and his use by date

“I’m still looking for something,” sings Jackson Browne on the opening track of his first album in eight years. “I’m way out over my due date.” It sounds like a stark admission, as if he’s as surprised as anyone that he’s still recording at 72.
Browne’s reputation has helped keep him aloft. He was the most artful of the 1970s west coast songwriters, who didn’t just spill his guts in confessional style but chronicled the boomer generation’s uncertain and increasingly disillusioned path through a landscape in which hippy idealism had withered: “Caught between the longing for love and the struggle for legal tender,” as he put it on 1976’s The Pretender, a song that fairly accurately presaged the dawning of the yuppie era. When the yuppie era duly arrived, he didn’t necessarily grow with his audience – a significant portion of them deserted him, presumably turned off by his increasingly strident leftwing tone. By the mid-80s, there were substantially fewer takers for Browne’s angry and accusatory Lives in the Balance than for the less specific, well-things-have-certainly-changed wistfulness of his old pal Don Henley’s Building the Perfect Beast – though some of them returned when he dialed down the politics on 1993’s I’m Alive.

Nevertheless, decades later, there is a sense in which Browne still embodies the classic boomer singer-songwriter, at least insofar as he spends a lot of Downhill from Everywhere doing precisely the kinds of things that septuagenarian songwriters of a certain cast tend to do, including worrying about the environment, wondering aloud about the younger generation, dabbling in global music (there’s a Caribbean lilt to Love Is Love and a distinct Latin-American flavour to the rhythms of closer A Song for Barcelona) and writing love songs to a new partner who is evidently considerably younger than he is. “The years I’ve seen that fell between my date of birth and yours / fade beyond the altered shore of a river changing course,” he sings on Minutes to Downtown.

Browne is good at all this stuff. A May to December romance is a tricky topic to essay in song without sounding like, as Smash Hits would have put it in the 80s, Uncle Disgusting. (Let us pause and spend a moment of horrified silence recalling Chris de Burgh’s 1994 hit Blonde Hair, Blue Jeans as an example of the absolute worst that can happen.) But Minutes to Downtown pulls it off, perhaps because it focuses on Browne’s age (“close to the end”) rather than that of his partner. The whole thing is shot through with a sadness based in encroaching mortality.

The title track feels like a distant relation of 1974’s Before the Deluge, which also viewed nature as a terrifying, ultimately ungovernable force. And Browne has had plenty of practice at what used to be called “message songs” – including practice at getting them wrong. Perhaps haunted by the thought that not everyone who bought his 70s albums agreed with him about the Reagan era (“Among the human beings in their designer jeans, am I the only one who hears the screams?” he pondered on 1983’s Lawyers in Love) he developed a tendency to lyrically beat people over the head. The causes he supported were just, and you never doubted his sincerity, but you did occasionally wonder how much good lecturing people would do. That doesn’t happen here. Or at least not much: there’s a definite whiff of ham-fisted hectoring about Until Justice Is Real, but The Dreamers’ story of an illegal immigrant focusses on the small human details and is more moving and powerful for it. A Little Soon To Say is better yet, surveying Generation Z with a very realistic, genuinely touching cocktail of hope and parental concern that they might not be able to fix the mess they’ve inherited: “Beyond the sickness of our day and after what we’ve come to live with / I want to know if you’re OK.”

In the US, Browne is a longstanding part of the cultural landscape, the author of a string of platinum-selling albums, regularly hailed as one of the greatest songwriters of all time. In Britain, he remains more of a cult concern. He’s never had a Top 20 album here, his solitary hit single was a cover – a 1978 live version of the Zodiacs’ old doo-wop classic Stay – and his best-known songs are those sung by others: Take It Easy, the song he co-wrote with Glenn Frey for the Eagles and, at least since the release of The Royal Tenenbaums, Nico’s gorgeous, wintry version of These Days. Downhill from Everywhere isn’t the kind of album that is going to alter that imbalance. The music is slick and well-crafted – as you might expect, given the abundance of veteran LA sessioneers in the credits – rather than gasp-inducing. But then, at 72, Browne probably isn’t in the business of overturning expectations and fishing for new fans. You suspect that as long as his albums can justifying staying out over his due date, he’s happy. Downhill from Everywhere does.


Jackson Browne: Downhill from Everywhere review – voice of the boomers faces his mortality

 

A 6min+ song with 'Love' in title got my ear and stayed there. (This was actually A Little Soon To Say which I adore!).

Still Looking For Something is an early favorite and that with My Cleveland Heart make for a complementary pair. I think the opening track found me pretty quickly and appealingly.

I like Minutes to Downtown. The melody and the changes within. The instrumentation. Only thing is the vocal sounds a bit wobbly at times for an album take. Sure JB can do a smoother one that that! Would like to hear this in concert or another take or mix of it or in another context.

The album has some songs I will be returning to listen to.

 

Cleveland Clinic developed a total artificial heart which got spun off into a separate company called Cleveland Heart. Leave it to Jackson Browne to write such a witty and endearing song about an artificial heart! This song has been climbing its way up my favorites list for this album, though A Little Soon to Say is still number one for me.

 

Amazon UK now showing stock
I've just ordered today,

 

It seems pretty widely available now.Probably more of a delayed production/distribution issue than one caused by a very low production run.I got my copy a week ago and have only played it once.Pretty impressed on first listen.

 

I've really enjoyed this so far. To my ears the best thing he's done since "I'm alive".

 

My double LP arrived earlier today, at long last - I'd placed an order for Downhill from Here, Late for the Sky and Running on Empty months ago but then of course RoE was a no show but it took the online shop ages to let me know
LftS is the EU 2017, mastered by Ron McMaster at Capitol and pressed at Pallas. A really nice copy, flat and quiet, as you'd expect from Pallas, and I especially enjoy the bass on those tracks - but then I enjoy the work of Ron McMaster.
I'm listening to Downhill from Here now and I'm grateful to Jackson Browne for going the extra mile of having his more recent records cut by people like Jeff Powell, pressed at Pallas Germany on heavy vinyl and sold for the price of a single vinyl record.

On a side note, the song Love is Love is an interesting, sweet curio for me because he co-wrote it while visiting Haiti, where he met Father Rick, an incredibile man who has dedicated his life to the people of the island. My wife and I started supporting his cause many years ago and Jackson celebrating the man is just sweet:

Rick rides a motorbike through the worst slums of the city
The father and the doctor to the poorest of the poor
Raising up the future from the rubble of the past

 

Great opener! Yep.

"And I'm still looking for something
Way out over my due date..."

 

Thanks for quoting. I had forgotten about this. I seemed to listen to it and liked about half of it so I should buy some downloads or the cd. Thanks. There are a few there I think that would be real good to hear new in concert.

 

Listening to Running on Empty 2019 as I type - I was able to get a decently priced copy in the EU @ €24.99 rather than the €30something that seems to be the going price - if one can find it at all.
Mastered by Gavin Lurssen and Reuben Cohen, vinyl mastering by Ron McMaster, vinyl manufactured by The Pallas Group.
I can rest easy now, this is a gem.
Nice booklet too. Thanks Jackson!

 

People might be interest in this podcast episode from Melbourne community station Triple-R. It's the second of two weekly episodes in which he interviews Jackson Browne and they talk at great length about the new album and other things.

https://www.rrr.org.au/explore/programs/off-the-record/episodes/17004-off-the-record-31-july-2021

 

I have the vinyl and it's a gorgeous sounding album. There's nothing on the album that shimmers like the nostalgic "Birds of St. Marks" from his last album, but I think that it has some great work. I like "A Little Soon to Say", which is I think an expression of hope for our children, given the sorry state of the world. It's effective. The title track will be a great show opener. 7/10

 

This album really benefits from repeated listens. It’s a wonderful addition to 2021. Thank you Jackson.

 

Just got done reading the thread where nobody really loved the new Doobie Brothers album, Liberte. I did. And on this thread, lots of people are "meh"ing this Jackson Browne album. I think it's superb, and gets better with each listen. Next I will check out the Lindsey Buckingham thread on his latest "Lindsey Buckingham" album, and I'm sure nobody really likes that either. Again, I do. What surprises me about Jackson Browne discussions is how seldom "I'm Alive" comes up. In my mind, it's his best album by far. So many standout tunes, some surprising styles, and gorgeously performed and produced. I think it's one of THE best albums of the 1990s.

 

No argument on I'm Alive. Sky Blue and Black is one of the best songs he ever wrote and one of my all time favourites

 

Jackson Browne, like many other artists of the 1970s, seems a victim of the "classic rock musician" label. Most radio stations, if they play anything by him at all, it will be the same old same old: "Running On Empty" or "The Load-out/Stay".