JACKSON BROWNE : DOWNHILL FROM EVERYWHERE

JACKSON BROWNE : DOWNHILL FROM EVERYWHERE

Still Looking for Something
My Cleveland Heart
Minutes to Downtown
A Human Touch (with Leslie Mendelson)
Love Is Love
Downhill from Everywhere
The Dreamer
Until Justice Is Real
A Little Soon to Say
A Song for Barcelona

Label : Inside Recordings

Release Date : July 23, 2021

Length : 50:04

Review (AllMusic) : Jackson Browne albums don't come around all that often anymore. During his prolific years in the 1970s and '80s, he had plenty to say and said it with the sensitivity and poetic candor that is his stock-in-trade. Released in July 2021, Downhill from Everywhere is Browne's fourth studio album since the turn of the millennium, and it's a pretty good one. One of the defining voices of the boomer generation, he epitomized the laid-back singer/songwriter sound of the West Coast and in that respect, little has changed. At 72, Browne's musical legacy remains undiminished and if Downhill isn't a particularly radical entry in his catalog, it has the heart, craft, and veteran presence of an artist who has little to prove, but still a bit more to say. Warmly arranged in the lean manner of his best '70s work, the ten-song set is a delight of tasteful guitar work, folk-rock charm, and perceptive lyrics befitting the singer's current position on the timeline. Among the reflections on mortality (the wistful "Still Looking for Something") and late-in-life romance ("Minutes to Downtown") are more topical concerns like the environment (the title track's punchy anti-pollution plea) and immigration (the poignant "The Dreamer"). In this way, Downhill adheres to Browne's late-period album template of presenting a fairly even balance of the personal and political. Captaining the expected band of L.A. studio stalwarts with easy grace, it's an album full of strong performances, few missteps, and the weary charisma that has been one of the singer's hallmarks. A half-century into his career, that timeless feeling that signified even Browne's earliest releases is still present, if ever-so-slightly more shopworn by time's passing.

Review (Lust For Life) : Op het eerste gezicht is de titel van het nieuwe album van Jackson Browne wel erg somber. Duikelen we echt met z'n allen de afgrond in? Downhill From Everywhere blijkt echter vooral te slaan op de immense hoeveelheid plastic die we als wereldbevolking gebruiken en waarvan een aanzienlijk deel uiteindelijk in de zeeën en oceanen terechtkomt. Nog altijd een ernstig probleem natuurlijk, maar het vijftiende album biedt wel degelijk hoop. Zo zijn The Dreamer, Love Is Love en A Human Touch oproepen tot menselijkheid: het antwoord op veel van onze problemen. Browne zingt de teksten met een stem die sinds de jaren zeventig nauwelijks aan soepelheid heeft ingeboet. Zoals ook zijn ingetogen mix van folk, country en rock nog niets van zijn charme verloren heeft. Het is onrealistisch om te verwachten dat hij op zijn 72ste het niveau van zijn klassieke werk evenaart, maar hij komt in diverse nummers toch verdraaid dichtbij: van het pittig rockende titelnummer tot het Latin-achtige, deels in het Spaans gezongen The Dreamer. In dat laatste nummer vormen Chavonne Stewart en Alethea Mills ook nog eens een heerlijk koortje. Warmbloedige muziek en teksten vol wijsheid. We hebben een artiest als Jackson Browne harder dan ooit nodig.

Review (Under The Radar) : 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.

Review (The Guardian) : "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. Jackson Browne: Downhill From Everywhere artwork Jackson Browne: Downhill from Everywhere album cover. Photograph: Edward Burtynsky 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. Jackson Browne Jackson Browne: 'I think desire is the last domino to fall' Read more 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." Advertisement 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.