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Album: Jackson Browne – Downhill From Everywhere
July 29, 2021
https://theartsdesk.com/new-music/album-jackson-browne-downhill-everywhere
Album: Jackson Browne – Downhill From Everywhere
Still giving a shit
It’s hard to believe that it’s almost 50 years since I splurged a day’s Saturday pay on For Everyman, Jackson Browne’s second album. The title track alone was worth it. A couple of years on and Late for the Sky yielded “Before the Deluge” and “Fountain of Sorrow”.He’s written some great songs – and let’s not forget that “Take It Easy”, co-written with Glenn Frey, gave the Eagles their first hit. Another singer-songwriter from the fabled Laurel Canyon scene.
Downhill From Everywhere, a pretty good summing-up of where we all are, is Browne’s first album in seven years and only his 15th in total: a modest output in such a long career. But then he’s a perfectionist. Written before Covid (which he caught) upended the world that Trump had so fatally destabilised, it’s easily recognisable as Jackson Browne, in terms of both overall style and his voice, which remains in good shape with the characteristically world-weary tone. It’s his usual mix of the personal and the political, the two aspects of his life and work kept always in balance, as he demonstrates once more in “Song for Barcelona”, the album’s closer.
Working with guitarists Greg Leisz and Val McCallum, bassist Bob Glaub, Jeff Young on keyboards, Mauricio Lewak on drums, and vocalists Chavonne Stewart and Alethea Mills, all long-time collaborators, and recording close to home in Santa Monica, Browne the craftsman serves up an album that was several years in the making yet which remains fresh and topical. The issues don’t go away, the can simply gets kicked down the road. The title track worries about the oceans – environmental catastrophe is the album’s underlying theme – and the ruin we continue to inflict. In the week two megamillionaires launched themselves briefly into space, the line about “all mankind’s ambition and vanity” sure hits home.
There are moments of real tenderness: “A Human Touch”, which is what we’ve been missing all year, is beautiful, a proper duet, Leslie Mendelson sharing the vocal with Browne, their entwined voices underpinned by Leisz on pedal steel. “The Dreamer” bowls along, its upbeat Tex-Mex style deliberately at odds with the subject, the heartbreak stories of those who “cross oceans and deserts and rivers/ Carrying nothing more than the dream of what life could be”. The song is co-written with Eugene Rodriguez, founder of Los Cenzontles, a band which began as part of a California Arts Council artist residency, and David Hidalgo of Los Lobos. It’s sung in English and Spanish, the story told through the eyes of one young woman who “pledged her future to this land”.
The album ends in exhilarating rumba-flamenco style, complete with Raúl Rodriguez’s palmas and a chorus in Catalan, with “A Song for Barcelona”, a love song to the city “that gave me back my fire – and restored my appetite”, a city in which he can imagine living, “in my escape from rock and roll”.
“No one gives a shit but Jackson Browne”, Randy Newman sang in “A Piece of the Pie”. Browne’s not the only one but he’s certainly kept the faith. Let’s hope he doesn’t make his escape quite yet.
Link to Article Album: Jackson Browne – Downhill From EverywhereAlbum reviews: Jackson Browne – Downhill from Everywhere and Leon Bridges – Gold-Diggers Sound
July 29, 2021
Jackson Browne’s new record shows a master songwriter with the wind in his sails, while Leon Bridges stays the R&B course after a maelstrom of genre-blurring albums
Link to Article Album reviews: Jackson Browne – Downhill from Everywhere and Leon Bridges – Gold-Diggers SoundJACKSON BROWNE: DOWNHILL FROM EVERYWHERE
July 29, 2021
https://www.folkradio.co.uk/2021/07/jackson-browne-downhill-from-everywhere/
by Mike Davies 21 July, 2021
Jackson Browne – Downhill From Everywhere
Inside Recordings – 23 July 2021
His first new material in six years, Downhill From Everywhere, finds Jackson Browne on vintage form, marrying hummable melodies to both perceptive social commentary lyrics and love songs, addressing doubt and dignity, the need for justice, connection and tolerance in turbulent times. His lyrics are informed by a sense of encroaching mortality, that of the world as much as his own (“I’m way out over my due date baby”), with, as he sings on Until Justice Is Real, “Time like a fuse burning shorter every day”.
Downhill From Everywhere was recorded with an accomplished core band that includes Greg Leisz and Val McCallum on guitars, bassist Bob Glaub, drummer Mauricio Lewak and Jeff Young on keys. It opens with Still Looking For Something, a melodically laid back rolling rhythm number. Musically, it harks to those early albums with their West Coast vibe as he sings about always hoping for a better future (“I knew since I was just little/The sharp edges of the world will whittle/Your dreams down to shavings at your feet/Gonna do my best not to settle/I know it’s gonna test my mettle/To keep my options open- even so I’m hoping”).
With the drums taking the pace up, co-penned with McCallum, My Cleveland Heart (a reference to the world-renowned Cleveland Clinic) is a playful number with a serious undercurrent about how life would be if we were fitted with unbreakable, artificial hearts (“They’re made to take a bashin’/And never lose their passion …Don’t make mistakes/And they don’t know defeat”).
Russ Kunkel taking over the drum seat and Young on Hammond, the first of the lengthier tracks arrives with the chugging beat, Minutes To Downtown, an upbeat and autobiographical number about it never being too late to find love (“I didn’t think that I would ever feel this way again/No, not with a story this long and this close to the end”), in this case with someone younger (“The years I’ve seen that fell between my date of birth and yours/Fade before the altered shore of a river changing course”). However, the song could equally be about leaving his longtime love, LA, for new pastures.
With yet another drum seat swap to bring in Jay Bellarose with Leisz on the pedal and lap steel and Patrick Warren on keyboards, up next, co-written with Steve McEwan and Leslie Mendelson, the latter duetting with Browne is, to my mind, the album’s greatest track, A Human Touch, a quietly beautiful song about finding connection regardless your sexual orientation (“You can call it a decision/I say it’s how we’re made… There will always be pain/But because of it there will always be love”), a song I’d rank up there with Before The Deluge and The Pretender.
Love Is Love hits the mid-way mark with a Caribbean lilt, as a song that reminds us that everyone has their troubles, even in those places that we fantasise as some island paradise (“here, on the broken city streets of the island/People work and live and love and struggle every day”) but, Alethea Mills and Chavonne Stewart on backing vocals, there is still hope (“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/Here they say – L’espua fe viv – Hope makes life”).
Edging six minutes, the title track, written with Leisz and Young, is a Browne riff-driven rocker that’s essentially a list number about everything going to shit that speaks of polluting the oceans and takes a swipe at the NRA, the GOP and the ICE.
Another standout comes with the lilting Texicana sway of The Dreamer, a bi-lingual collaboration with Eugene Rodriguez which, based on a young woman they both know, is about a Mexican immigrant facing deportation, with Browne calling on those who see only enemies and walls to realise that is these that “Keep us prisoners of our fear”.
Browne has long been an activist and, with its tribal thump rhythm and Waddy Wachtel’s electric guitar, Until Justice Is Real takes its title from the rallying cry of the activist group Color of Change who aim “to create a more human and less hostile world for Black people in America”. As to the Stonesy-sounding Start Me Up guitar licks, he pointedly declares, “You want the truth you got to find it on your own/It may not be that easy to see/The truth is going to cost you in the land of the free/It’s a good question to be asking yourself/What is the good life, what is wealth?/What is the future I’m trying to see?/What does that future need from me?”
It closes with the two longest cuts, first the scuffed drums and understated resonator guitar of A Little Soon To Say, a song that conjures humanity looking for something they can’t quite place, not realising “all we’ve ever needed/Has been there all along inside of you and me” as, mingling hope and doubt, he sings “I want to see you holding out your light/I want to see you light the way/Beyond the sirens and the broken night/Beyond the sickness of our day/And after all we’ve come to live with/I want to know if you’re ok/ I’ve got to think it’s going to be alright/It’s just a little soon to say”.
It ends with the eight-minute plus A Song For Barcelona, another bi-lingual number written by the entire core band, a tango rhythm, handclaps and foot stamping love song to the Spanish city that “that gave me back my fire – and restored my appetite” with a lyric that echoes the sentiment of Before The Deluge as he sings of a gathering of souls united by a common vision:
They come from Ireland, they come from Africa
They come from the US, they come from Canada
They come from Norway, they come from China
They come from Uruguay, and from Bulgaria
They come for pleasure
They come for freedom
For the chance encounter
Or the revelation
They come for business
Or for adventure
And fall in love with the information
About the world, and about each other
They dream, and when they wake up
They’re not in Spain anymore
Browne has described the song as him envisioning a life beyond music (“my escape from rock n roll”), as just another face in the crowd, suggesting perhaps this may be a swansong? Whether that proves to be the case or not, Downhill From Everywhere is a glorious high.
Downhill From Everywhere is out on 23 July.
Link to Article JACKSON BROWNE: DOWNHILL FROM EVERYWHEREJackson Browne: Downhill from Everywhere review – voice of the boomers faces his mortality
July 29, 2021
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2021/jul/15/jackson-browne-downhill-from-everywhere-review
(Inside Recordings)
Still regarded as the most artful of 1970s west coast singer-songwriters, Browne frets about the environment and his use by date
Alexis PetridisThu 15 Jul 2021 12.00 BST
“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 dialled 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.
Downhill from Everywhere is released 23 July.