Jackson Browne interview:

“The solutions lie in our individual choices, the way we

live our lives, and what we decide to do in the world. But I
think that corresponds to each person’s own understanding.
I’m not trying to just write another broadside or polemic.
I’m just trying to refer to these things that everybody’s
going through, and to refer to them in a way that show that
at the heart of it is the idea that I’m glad to be alive now
when these problems need to be solved. I’m glad to be here
now when I’m needed and when we’re all needed. I’m glad
to be engaged with these problems and not living through
some escapist idea of wishing I lived a thousand years ago
or at some point in the future.”
“So yeah, if I could be anywhere I’d want to be right here.”
“There are some things I don’t want to do,” he says flatly
of his approach to songwriting. “I don’t want to preach to
or harangue people. I want to catch their interest. The song
Standing in the Breach is me really writing about an
earthquake, and then right away it turns into a song about
poverty and endemic inequity. But I’m not really trying to
write a rock essay with these things. I want to write a good
song.”
“So I wanted to make reference to the earthquake in Haiti, a
country that started out as a colony that threw off the yoke
of slavery. They became a country by accepting a debt, and
they still owe that debt. What’s really going on in that
country is the perpetuation of the inequities that gave rise to
slavery in the first place. The song tries to refer to that in a
way that I hope leads the listener to take that into
consideration, because the more we wake up, the more
we’re still in a dream.”
“I want to write songs that are thoughtful and consider the
problems that we face. I’m not trying to have a song offer
the solutions.”
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browne-standing-in-the-breach-the-
interview/#sthash.UvStk8ER.dpuf
“That’s a song that I love because I met him in Cuba, and
we became good friends, and there’s a whole political
context that song takes place in. I wrote the English version
and I think it speaks very strongly to people in the United
States. There can be freedom only when nobody owns it,
but we do act like we own it. We do act like we’ve got to
dispense our freedom, like it’s a product that we
manufacture and we’re going to make it available to the
people of Afghanistan.”
“The reality is a little bit tougher, and a little bit harder to
take. The problem lies in our proprietary attitude toward it,
like it’s something that we invented.”
“But we didn’t invent it, and we often don’t even practice
it. So there’s a lot of political context behind some of these
songs. I don’t really know any way of making the songs
contain all of that political information, but maybe they will
move people to find out more about what I’m writing
about, or even to spend some more time thinking about it.
Ultimately that would be great, but I’m not trying to write a
polemic.”
Browne also completed a lyric by Woody Guthrie, given
to him by the late folk legend’s daughter Nora. It was
easier, Browne confides, because he’s constantly changing
lyrics, writing and re-writing until the 11th hour.
“I’m always arguing with myself about certain things in
each song,” he says about his peerless lyric abilities. “I’ll
change things around or try other things. I do that during
recording a lot of the time. Sometimes on the record there
are older versions of the lyrics that are just slightly different
than what I might do live as the song develops. I’ve
realized that a lot of the time when a song first gets
recorded, it’s almost like the last installment in writing the
song.”
“Then you go out on the road and there’s something that
happens, beyond that. So even though I’ve recorded the
song that doesn’t mean that’s the only way of playing it. On
this record, the songs got written and they evolved as they
got tracked, because it was also about getting the
recordings to reflect the meaning. A lot of that meaning is
really in the way the songs are played. The Woody Guthrie
song, for instance. There’s a lot of political stuff in there
that’s really beneath the surface and I don’t know how to
bring it out, but we do in the performance, I think.”
It’s no wonder that Browne is able to capture such intimacy
and depth in his recordings. He was one of the first artists
to insist on producing his own material, and on his debut
album. How did he know that was so important?
“I wasn’t conscious of that when I started making records,”
Browne confesses. “I guess the first sessions I ever
attended were sessions where they were recording my
songs. At the very first one, they were trying to cut three
songs in three hours. I could see that these guys were an
incredible team.”
“Don Randi was a piano player on this gig. At one point I
was trying to tell the drummer to adjust something that he
was playing. Don Randi said, ‘Come over here, kid. Come
sit down next to me.’ There was a way that people in the
studios did these arrangements. I realized that any one guy
could make the thing really come alive. The next sessions I
went to, Jim Keltner was the drummer. So Keltner was
playing on one of my songs that Jerry Rivers was
recording, and he was like, ‘You wrote this song? No
kidding? It’s cool!’ So he was very friendly.”
“But Jim’s always been that way. Not just to me. I’ve seen
him do it with lots of other people. He’s a special player.
He’s sort of like Yoda in the studio. The first session I did
with Jim Keltner on one of my songs was These Days. He
had taught drums in the same music store that David
Lindley taught banjo in Pasadena. They were old friends.
David Lindley had not only played on that second album,
we’d already been on the road for a year together. I decided
not to bring a band out on that tour, because everybody I
tried was not really up to the level of David.”
Photo: Nels Israelson
“So we just went out, the two of us. When it came time to
make a record, we knew we had to add something
complementary to what we were already doing. That’s my
way into songs and producing, knowing that, under certain
conditions, things can happen when you get the right
people together. When he played, he played lap steel on
These Days. The original track sounds like an organ. He’s
just playing these pads on lap steel. For the solo, we first
mic’ed the neck of the lap steel and put him in an iso booth
away from the amp. I thought I’d be getting more of the
acoustic sound. It was a National lap steel, so there wasn’t
much going on, but you ended up hearing a lot of extra
stuff.”
“He only did one pass, but it was incredibly solid and at the
end it was a very kind of triumphant moment. Then I knew
what I wanted, but very often you don’t know what you
want. But really my becoming a producer had more to do
with me not wanting to produce. I wanted to find it myself,
because I’d been around sessions where there was
somebody just trying to influence things. I kept telling my
manager that I was afraid of guys coming in to supplant my
ideas and emotional truths with ones of their own. I didn’t
want to be a passenger!”
“So that’s how that happened.”
‘The songwriter was sort of ascendant in those days,”
Browne continues. “Maybe it’s been that way for a long
time, but at the time it was a new deal. It was a new sort of
way of going about things. A lot of people were singing,
but if they’d written the song they had the mandate to sing
the song. That carried over to how you wanted to treat it,
how you wanted it done. But as a producer I also like stuff
to just happen. I have definite preferences, but I also want
things to just happen. And I’ll rule out certain things. I have
a keyboardist who’s a really great pianist, but I might not
want that on the record.”
“I sometimes prefer the simplicity of the way I play
something maybe, even though the guy is the most soaring
and beautiful organ player. And sometimes I don’t know
until I hear it.”