Spotlight Album Review: Jackson Browne "Downhill from Everywhere"
Recent photos of Jackson Browne have caught some fans by surprise. The guy who always looked eternally youthful now looks all of his nearly 73 years – still handsome but just a little grizzled. His new album, Downhill from Everywhere, is the work of an artist comfortable with his age, but with great vitality, mixing both the personal and the topical.
The album was originally scheduled for his birthday in October, 2020, but held back because of the pandemic. “A Little Too Soon to Say,” a single released back in March, 2020, reflects the wisdom of a senior citizen:
I came for inspiration, I came looking for truth
And joined in celebration, the passing of my youth
We’re here but for a moment and none of us can see
Beyond the horizon – what kind of world that will be
Searching the horizon for what we hope to see
When all we’ve ever needed has been there all along
Inside of you and me
Other songs that reflect ever-growing maturity include “Still Looking for Something,” set to an easy groove, says “I’m way over my due date baby…Gonna keep my options open…If all I find is freedom, it’s alright.” “My Cleveland Heart” uses a cardiac care metaphor to express vulnerability: “I’ve been walkin’ that broken line between/The way life is and the way it seems.”
While Jackson takes sole credit as producer, several songs are strong co-writes. “Human Touch,” a collaboration with Steve McEwan and Leslie Mendelson (with a vocal duet by Leslie), shares a title with a Bruce Springsteen song, but is closer in spirit to the compassion of Bruce’s “Hungry Heart”: “Sometimes all anybody needs is a human touch.”
You might think the title track, “Downhill from Everywhere,” co-written by Greg Leisz and Jeff Young (members of Jackson’s touring band) was a personal statement about going downhill with age, but it’s a litany (not unlike “We Didn’t Start the Fire”) of the many things that drag our humanity downhill. Ultimately it’s a statement of our environmental vulnerability, for everything flows to the sea:
Do you think of the ocean as yours
Because you need the ocean to breathe
Every second breath you take is coming from the sea
The mid-point of the album, where that song resides, is where the political seeps a little more into the personal. “Love Is Love,” co-written with David Belle and originally recorded two years ago, celebrates, with a touch of Creole, the resilience of Haiti, that “island of hope” (needed, as it happens, more than ever now). “The Dreamer,” co-written with Eugene Rodriguez and David Hidalgo,” employs Spanish lyrics to express a migrant’s tragedy. The rocker “Until Justice Is Real,” uses all of Jackson’s band, plus Waddy Wachtel, on lead guitar, to make the zeitgeist visceral.
The closing track, “Song for Barcelona,” is an eight-minute opus with Hispanic rhythms, credited to five of those musicians, along with Jackson. It’s a tour of that great international city, “city that ignited my desire, and temporarily, my soul.” Whatever it took to inspire him, Downhill from Everywhere, Jackson’s first album in seven years (and just second in 13) shows that he can still deliver the goods. While many of us baby boomers will always cherish his legendary first five albums, we can be thankful that, like the old Almaden commercial (vowing “we sell no wine before its time”) this is a vintage release of prime quality.