For over 50 years, Jackson Browne has been chronicling the human condition and our search for love. Over the course of 15 albums, his treatises on mankind and our struggle for connection with the planet, and each other, have been carried out with great wisdom and wit.
He has never been frightened to wear his activism on his sleeve. Even the record cover, which views tiny Lilliputian figures against gigantic rusting single-hull ships is a symbol of the waste and throw-away society of today, and a reflection on the gargantuan size of the problem. It’s not just observation but a call to arms to stop the downward slide of the planet into oblivion.
Acknowledging the deep divisions in his country, Jackson has stated the importance of “inclusion” on the album.
I think the idea of opening yourself up to people who are different than you – that’s the fundamental basis for any kind of understanding in this world.
That search for connection sees songs that reflect and bask in the cultures in other countries. ‘Love Is Love’ (Cuba), ‘The Dreamer’ (Mexico), and ‘A Song For Barcelona’ (Spain). He asks the listener to both enjoy, and seek a basic understanding in other cultures and perspectives.
Questions set rather than answers dictated has always been Jackson’s method of tackling the big issues, and those investigations continue in songs such as ‘Still Looking For Something’, ‘Until Justice Is Real’, and ‘Too Soon To Say’, which is such as a quintessential Browne song it could sit easily on any his classic 70s albums.
‘Cleveland Heart’ is the most upbeat tune on the album. Co-written with guitarist extraordinaire Val McCallum, who trades rollicking licks with Greg Leisz on pedal steel, it’s a tale that zips along with Jackson looking for a man-made metal heart that comes without the man-made grief attached to our real ones.
They never break. They don’t even beat. And they don’t ache. They just plug in and shine. Don’t make mistakes and they don’t know defeat like my heart makes, like this broken heart of mine.
There’s a fun video released to accompany the song with a cameo from Phoebe Bridgers and Val McCallum as a surgeon replacing Jackson’s heart with the new unbreakable model.
The most affecting track on the album is the gorgeous duet with Leslie Mendelson ‘Human Touch’. Originally written for the film ‘5B’, a documentary about the San Francisco General Hospital AIDS ward during the early ’80s and how nurses and doctors there learned how to best to treat patients with dignity and kindness during the burgeoning epidemic.
The song carries a universal message of the need for human contact, regardless of colour, orientation, gender, or race.
Jackson Browne is, and has been, a chronicler of matters of the heart and humanity for over fifty years. His work remains deeply committed to change and improvement. His meditations on the human experience are deeply profound, yet accessible, and his place on the pantheon of the true greats is assured. This album gives further evidence to that claim if any further is required.
It is an album that is a rich mix of the personal and the political, and all that exists in the dwindling gap between.
Like all Jackson Browne albums, ‘Downhill From Everywhere’ is a record that people will return to over the years. Time is ticking and the fuse is burning, but these are songs for today and tomorrow.