News Archives: 2021
AP New This Week
July 27, 2021
— Master singer-songwriter Jackson Browne is releasing a new album on Friday, “Downhill From Everywhere,” his first in six years. The opening song, “Still Looking For Something,” is a sun-kissed ode to restless freedom, while the first single, “My Cleveland Heart,” is a playful imagining of getting a new artificial heart: “They’re made to take a bashin’/ And never lose their passion.” The title track is one of the best political songs he’s ever written, period. Unrushed, melancholic, worldly and subline, this is a timeless rock album designed to be played this summer racing across a shimmering blacktop with the top down.
Read MoreDavid Crosby and Jackson Browne Sing Like Angels But Roar Like Lions in Winter on New Records: Album Review
July 27, 2021
https://variety.com/2021/music/news/david-crosby-jackson-browne-album-reviews-1235026371/
At 79-going-on-80 and 72, respectively, David Crosby and Jackson Browne — two lyrical lions of the ’60s-into-’70s singer-songwriter movement — have faced more than their share of demons and angels battling on their shoulders. Lives lived to the fullest for the better and the worse, activist causes driven and dropped, both men are now creating age-conscious but not-so-elegiac songs and releasing their most potent, reflective and even imaginative work in decades with this weekend’s release of Crosby’s “For Free” and Browne’s “Downhill From Everywhere.”
From Frank Sinatra’s croonings on the autumn of his years to Leonard Cohen’s holy musings toward aging out and moving on, the art of growing old is its own aesthetic, a soul-searching subgenre where staring into an abyss is its own reward. But here Crosby and Browne’s unblinking stares are wide-eyed and almost fresh-faced, in their fashion.
For Crosby’s part, he and he co-producer son, James Raymond, shuffle the deck on his soulful, folksy usual, exalt his still-gorgeous vocals above sea level, poke their heads into jazzy chord changes, and lift the singer’s beloved harmonies and plain spoken soliloquies to a higher plane. To accomplish this, Crosby starts “For Free” with a “River Run” filled with his patented Byrds-ian jangle, a handful of smart platitudes and a strong, harmony-filled melody reminiscent of CSN’s “Southern Cross,” today sung in a clear, clean voice sounding younger than his days by a third.
Crosby expands that low-soaring harmonic sound into country-jazz territory with “I Think I,” and litters that lyrical minefield with a mix of smart-aleck charm and handsomely burnished clichés about fine lives forged with no manuals (“There’s no instructions / And no map / No secret way past the trap / It’s so confusing I keep losing my way”). While “The Other Side of Midnight” maintains a jazz complexity, a stop-start framework and a blast of the intricate signature finger-picking for which he’s known, “Rodriguez for a Night” finds jazz-bo Crosby in the Steely Dan-ish territory of Fender Rhodes, silver polished brass and bluesy guitar runs. Donald Fagen co-wrote the noir-lion-in-winter hummer with Crosby, and fills his aging outlaw paean with references to “getting too old to chase the dream.” But, funnily enough, both men sound as if they’re just getting started, with fresh funk to steer them. (For the record, the brass breaks running through the R&B-ish ballad “Secret Dancer” and the salty halt and wiry jet-fueled imagery of “Ships in the Night” both sound inspired by Fagen, in yet another case of teaching an old dog new and quirky tricks without taking him too far from his mien.
The album has a lone truly elegiac moment in the heartbreaking finale, “I Won’t Stay for Long,” written by Raymond, allowing his father a pensive, studied take on each phrase (“I’m standing on the porch / Like it’s the edge of a cliff / Beyond the grass and gravel / Lies a certain abyss”). But prior to that, there is another cover, “For Free,” the album’s title track, penned by his one-time paramour, Joni Mitchell. Sung in harmony with the effervescent Sarah Jarosz, the title track is one of the most open and most seductive vocals of his career, and one of the most glorious renderings of Mitchell’s songs in memory.
Ultimately, that is the best thing about Crosby’s “For Free”: that it’s not trying to be anything but a portrait of an angelic singer, an anthemic songwriter and an impressive interpreter now, and in the moment, without a shred of pretense.
Browne’s album is allso without pretense, but with more gusto and smart lyrical interplay than anything he’s mustered in the last 20 years (how many pop songs you know use the word, Anthropocene?). He maintains his long search for things “to test my mettle / To keep my options open,” as stated on the blunt, bluesy “Still Looking for Something.”
Working with Elvis Costello band stalwarts Pete Thomas and Davey Faragher, Browne focuses on tighter, more detailed portraits of himself and his subjects, rather than the bigger, broader lyrical social programs/protest of his past songs, in cuts lke the crisply rocking (but dumbly named) “My Cleveland Heart” and the spiritually romantic “Minutes to Downtown.” The latter track is one of Browne’s best, matching a cosmopolitan melody with a lyrical display of Raymond Carver-like allegories — and a sense of love and hate for L.A. “The years I’ve seen that fell between my date of birth and yours / Fade before the altered shore of a river changing course… Minutes to downtown, minutes to the Coast Highway / Forever on this freeway dreaming of my getaway / Don’t know how I’m still in L.A.”
The only song that bests “Minutes to Downtown” is the title track, a tight, Stones-ish rocker with a clipped, tight-lipped Browne performance that blossoms, by its multiple choruses, into a soulful multi-voiced opera that peeks through the slopes of vineyards, silver screens, Senate floors, Columbine and God’s golden shores, until the ravaged oceans are brought into question. “Do you think of the ocean as yours?… We don’t really know, because we don’t really see.”
Some of Browne’s lyrical whole-earth concerns seem to be ladled on thickly and by rote, just as some of his instrumental rock-outs can on occasion feel faceless (weird, considering that Bill Frisell, co-guitarist Greg Leisz and CSNY bassist Bob Glaub are part of the album’s core band). Beyond the quick bland asides, Browne sounds invigorated as he hasn’t since the ’80s.
What has given Browne fresh life as a songwriter — and as a newly passionate vocalist – may be the activist causes that befall us every day, the sort that made him write the dry but dramatic “Until Justice is Real.” More than anything, though, Browne sounds as If he’s fallen in love with music all over again. And maybe even with the sound of his own voice and what he can do with it. The highs that make David Crosby into an angel and the high-plains, plaintive wail of Jackson Browne make two vocalists In their unexpected prime ageless.
Read MoreJackson Browne Is Still Posing Musical Questions On ‘Downhill From Everywhere’
July 27, 2021
July 23, 2021
https://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2021/07/23/jackson-browne-album
Host Robin Young speaks with Rock & Roll and Songwriters Hall of Fame musician Jackson Browne, whose new album “Downhill From Everywhere” drops Friday.
This segment aired on July 23, 2021.
Read MoreReview: Jackson Browne Shares the Upside of a Downside
July 27, 2021
BY LEE ZIMMERMAN4 DAYS AGO
Jackson Browne
July 27, 2021
Downhill from Everywhere
Inside Recordings
Jul 23, 2021 WEB EXCLUSIVEBy Austin Saalman
https://www.undertheradarmag.com/reviews/downhill_from_everywhere_jackson_browne
Veteran Laurel Canyon troubadour and activist Jackson Browne has re-emerged with his first album in nearly seven years. On Downhill from Everywhere, Browne offers yet another blend of his signature heartache and sociopolitical commentary, not unlike that of 2014’s well-received Standing in the Breach.
Browne’s legacy ensures him his own exhibit in the museum of American music for his role in the development and popularization of the Laurel Canyon sound. At heart, however, he is more of a wanderer than an icon, his adventures having carried him from coast to coast, placing him alongside a number of significant figures of the time. He shared a fleeting love affair with Nico in New York and served a brief stint in Nitty Gritty Dirt Band back in California. He roomed in the basement below Glenn Frey and J.D. Souther’s shared apartment, both young unknowns at the time. He collaborated with Frey on “Take It Easy,” which became a hit for Frey’s group Eagles. He nurtured the career of Warren Zevon, producing his phenomenal early albums, helping to gain the struggling songwriter a bit of mainstream attention. As for himself, aside from releasing a number of popular hits, such as “Doctor, My Eyes” and “Somebody’s Baby,” Browne also recorded one of the finest albums of all time—1974’s somber Late for the Sky.
This in mind, Downhill from Everywhere continues the saga of Browne’s evolution from that young, sentimental singer/songwriter to a grizzled End Times prophet, his once smooth voice since given to the grizzled rasp of a man who has seen more than he’d have liked to. The foreboding specter of a nation aflame haunts even the more upbeat tracks with the same sense of urgent desperation present on Standing in the Breach.
Opening track “Still Looking for Something” is a welcome return to form for Browne, whose output has been hit and miss since the release of 1996’s Looking East. The track, Browne’s haggard promise of perseverance and possibility, rings familiar somehow—a welcome throwback to his glory years. When he sings, “I’m still looking for something/I’m out here under the streetlight baby, I’m/Still looking for something in the night,” one immediately recalls the prematurely world-weary 20-something of 1972’s Jackson Browne and 1973’s For Everyman. Here he is, at 72, still chasing the same prospect which has preoccupied much of his output for nearly five decades—that of freedom. Except, Browne seems somehow content this time around, shedding the anxious anguish of his former self to boldly resolve, “If I don’t find it this time/It’s alright.”
The subsequent “My Cleveland Heart” also recalls Browne’s previous sound, perhaps more at home on 1980’s Hold Out or 1983’s Lawyers In Love. Upbeat and danceable, the chorus reminds the listener that Browne’s remarkable pop expertise remains alive and at the forefront of his creative process.
The dusky “Minutes to Downtown” conjures subtle shades of 1986’s “In the Shape of a Heart.” Rife with devastation and containing some of the finest poetry of Browne’s recent career, “Minutes to Downtown” is an atmospheric achievement, yet another artistic accomplishment for a voice at its most powerful when addressing themes of disillusion, restlessness, and loss.
The issue with the remaining six tracks, excluding penultimate ballad “A Little Soon to Say,” is that they each seem to resemble the least desirable aspects of 1986’s Lives in the Balance and 1989’s World in Motion, in that the heavy lyrical messages tend to outweigh the music.
The issues addressed on Downhill from Everywhere—immigration, pollution, inequality, democracy under fire—are not new concerns for Browne, whose political output increased greatly in the ’80s. At times, said approach has worked well for him, as exemplified on 1986’s “For America” and 2014’s “The Long Way Around.” Downhill from Everywhere, on the other hand, fumbles much of its noble efforts.
The album’s title track, for example, sounds less like a bold “put up your dukes” challenge to the establishment than it does a so-so rock number with lyrics such as, “Do you think of the ocean as yours?/Because you need the ocean to breathe.” The same can be spoken of the underwhelming “The Dreamer” and “Until Justice is Real,” which could easily have been an outtake from the Lives in the Balance sessions. The lyrics are blunt and far from controversial, reminding one more of a PSA announcement or generic campaign literature. In the same respect, the closing “A Song for Barcelona” falls short, somewhat resembling the text of a postcard or resort advertisement, although the intentions behind it may have been honest.
Jackson Browne is one of the boldest talents in American music, his first four albums standing as understated classics. Downhill from Everywhere, however, fails to recreate that magic, although the first three tracks come close. Browne is an intelligent artist with valid thoughts and concerns to address, but Downhill from Everywhere does not serve as a strong vehicle for such statements. (www.jacksonbrowne.com)
Author rating: 6/10
Read MoreJackson Browne
July 27, 2021
Downhill From Everywhere
(Inside Recordings, ***)
Jackson Browne was one of the most artistically and commercially successful singer-songwriters of the ‘70s, with classic records such as The Pretender and Running on Empty. As he became more involved in activist movements, many of his subsequent works, such as 1986′s Lives in the Balance, foregrounded social justice themes, with mixed results.
One of the remarkable things about Downhill From Everywhere, Browne’s 15th studio album, is how much it sounds like a solid, sturdy Jackson Browne album. Browne is 72, and his voice has weathered, but it’s familiar and comforting, especially on ballads such as “A Little Soon to Say.” He’s working with some longtime collaborators, including drummer Russ Kunkel (who appeared on his 1972 debut) and guitarist Waddy Wachtel. David Lindley, his regular foil, is absent, but pedal steel guitarist Greg Leisz effectively reprises Lindley’s role.
The album is full of character-driven stories, from the young immigrant in the empathetic bilingual ballad “The Dreamer” to the aging lover getting an artificial heart in the (somewhat stiff) rocker “My Cleveland Heart,” to the bicycle-riding Haitian priest in the lovely, loping “Love is Love,” to America itself on the title track.
Personal reflections bookend the album, beginning with “Still Looking for Something” and ending with “A Song for Barcelona,” an 8½-minute tribute to the “city that gave me back my fire and restored my appetite.” That feeling of rejuvenation permeates Downhill From Everywhere.
— Steve Klinge
Read MoreJACKSON BROWNE DELIVERS LATE ERA GEM ON ‘DOWNHILL FROM EVERYWHERE’ (ALBUM REVIEW)
July 27, 2021
July 22, 2021 by Doug Collette