I’ve listened to Jackson Browne for about 30 years, I have a friend who has a couple of older siblings who introduced him to this incredible songwriter/singer, I got it from my friend. I am eternally grateful.
allmusic says:
In many ways, Jackson Browne was the quintessential sensitive Californian singer/songwriter of the early ’70s. Only Joni Mitchell and James Taylor ranked alongside him in terms of influence, but neither artist tapped into the post-’60s Zeitgeist like Browne.
He is a true music enthusist and he has produced albums by The Eagles, J.D. Souther and Warren Zevon and more. When he was inducted into The Rock’n Roll Hall of Fame, Bruce Springsteen said that even if The Eagles was allready in the hall of fame: “You wrote the songs they wished they had written”. Bruce says all the good things that I would like to say about Jackson Browne, take ten minutes and listen to this very fine speech:
Here are my ten favourite Jackson Browne songs.
1. Sleeps dark and silent gate, one of the most beautiful songs ever written:
“Don’t know where I’m going Wishing I could hide Oh God this is some shape I’m in When the only thing that makes me cry Is the kindness in my baby’s eye”
2. Tender is the night, official video:
“You’re gonna want me tonight When you’re ready to surrender Forget about who’s right When you’re ready to remember It’s another world at night When you’re ready to be tender”
…and a live version from Rockpalast in 1986:
3. The Pretender (with Crosby, Stills and Nash):
“I’m gonna find myself a girl Who can show me what laughter means And we’ll fill in the missing colors In each other’s paint-by-number dreams And then we’ll put our dark glasses on And we’ll make love until our strength is gone And when the morning light comes streaming in We’ll get up and do it again Get it up again”
4. For a dancer:
“I don’t know what happens when people die Can’t seem to grasp it as hard as I try It’s like a song playing right in my ear That I can’t sing I can’t help listening”
5. Before the Deluge:
“For the resignation that living brings And exchanged love’s bright and fragile glow For the glitter and the rouge And in a moment they were swept before the deluge”
A couple of days ago, Arcade Fire Tube released a video of Arcade Fire performing “Crucified Again”, a new song (from New York last Thursday, 4 oct). The band has played the the track before (Hotel Oloffson, Port-au-Prince, Haiti) but this is the first time the song was captured on video.
The official release date or title for their new album, however, has yet to be confirmed.
“The fact that you didn’t intend to release it makes it the most intimate record you’ll ever do. This is an absolutely legitimate piece of art.” Steven Van Zandt
“I felt that it was my best writing. I felt I was getting better as a writer. I was learning things. I was certainly taking a hard look at everything around me.” Bruce Springsteen
I really love this album. I did not buy it in 1982 I got it a few years later, I listened to it at the record store when it was released, but it didn’t impress me. I couldn’t connect to it musically or lyrically. It is not an album that imidiately catches your attention, it needs to be listened to, properly.
When I did that I became very impressed!
Some facts (from Wikipedia):
Released
September 30, 1982
Recorded
Mostly January 3, 1982 at Springsteen’s Colts Neck, New Jersey bedroom
Genre
Americana, folk rock, folk
Length
40:50
Label
Columbia
Producer
Bruce Springsteen
Nebraska is the sixth studio album by Bruce Springsteen, released in 1982 on Columbia Records.
Sparsely-recorded on a cassette-tape Portastudio, the tracks on Nebraska were originally intended as demos of songs to be recorded with the E Street Band. However, Springsteen ultimately decided to release the demos themselves. Nebraska remains one of the most highly-regarded albums in his catalogue. The songs on Nebraska deal with ordinary, blue collar characters who face a challenge or a turning point in their lives. Unlike his previous albums, very little salvation and grace is present within the songs.
Initially, Springsteen recorded demos for the album at his home with a 4-track cassette recorder. The demos were sparse, using only acoustic guitar, electric guitar (“Open All Night”), harmonica, mandolin, glockenspiel, tambourine, organ and Springsteen’s voice.
Springsteen then recorded the album in a studio with the E Street Band. However, he and the producers and engineers working with him felt that a raw, haunted folk essence present on the home tapes was lacking in the band treatments, and so they ultimately decided to release the demo version as the final album. Complications with mastering of the tapes ensued because of low recording volume, but the problem was overcome with sophisticated noise reduction techniques.
Springsteen fans have long speculated whether Springsteen’s full-band recording of the album, nicknamed Electric Nebraska, will ever surface. In a 2006 interview, manager Jon Landau said it was unlikely and that “the right version of Nebraska came out”. But in a 2010 interview with Rolling Stone, E Street Band drummer Max Weinberg praised the full band recording of the album as “killing.”
“There is an adage in the record business that a recording artist’s demos of new songs often come off better than the more polished versions later worked up in a studio. But Bruce Springsteen was the first person to act on that theory, when he opted to release the demo versions of his latest songs, recorded with only acoustic or electric guitar, harmonica, and vocals, as his sixth album, Nebraska. It was really the content that dictated the approach, however. Nebraska‘s ten songs marked a departure forSpringsteen, even as they took him farther down a road he had been traveling previously. Gradually, his songs had become darker and more pessimistic, and those on Nebraska marked a new low. They also found him branching out into better developed stories…”
Promo poster for Nebraska in 1982
Robert Christgau:
Literary worth is established with the title tune, in which Springsteen’s Charlie Starkweather becomes the first mass murderer in the history of socially relevant singer-songwriting to entertain a revealing thought–wants his pretty baby to sit in his lap when he gets the chair. Good thing he didn’t turn that one into a rousing rocker, wouldn’t you say, though (Hüsker Dü please note) I grant that some hardcore atonality might also produce the appropriate alienation effect. But the music is a problem here–unlike, er, Dylan, or Robert Johnson, or Johnny Shines or Si Kahn or Kevin Coyne, Springsteen isn’t imaginative enough vocally or melodically to enrich these bitter tales of late capitalism with nothing but a guitar, a harmonica, and a few brave arrangements. Still, this is a conceptual coup, especially since it’s selling. What better way to set right the misleading premise that rock and roll equals liberation? A-
Nebraska is an acoustic triumph, a basic folk album on which Springsteen has stripped his art down to the core. It’s as harrowing as Darkness on the Edge of Town, but more measured. Every small touch speaks volumes: the delicacy of the acoustic guitars, the blurred sting of the electric guitars, the spare, grim images. He’s now telling simple stories in the language of a deferential common man, peppering his sentences with “sir’s.” “My name is Joe Roberts,” he sings. “I work for the state.”
“Now judge I had debts no honest man could pay
The bank was holdin’ my mortgage and they were gonna take my house away
Now I ain’t sayin’ that makes me an innocent man
But it was more ‘n all this that put that gun in my hand”
Bruce Springsteen would try to recreate Nebraska in 1995 when he released The Ghost of Tom Joad, an album that is very similar musically and lyrically. As much as I love The Ghost of Tom Joad, it was impossible to recreate the “accident” that happened on this simple casette demo, recorded in a New Jersey bedroom in January 1982.
I have nearly 30 albums by Townes Van Zandt, most of them live and released after he passed away. Most of them better than 99% of everything released today.
My mother and father are heavy smokers. When we went camping when I was a child we drove in our Opel Record. No safety belts, no windows open, just lot of smoke and country music.
It is glued into me, I still love those voices, Waylon Jennings, Burl Ives, Kenny Rogers, Johnny Cash, Townes Van Zandt and a whole bunch of other fantastic singers and songwriters.
I don’t mind the smoke as long a s I get the music!
One of my favourite songs from back then is If I Needed You, so sparse and so vulnerable.
My father had a good friend, Reidar, who collected all these great country artists. He was very passionate about the music and he was a very kind man. He died of cancer much too young.
He gave me casettes of fantastic country and western music, I didn’t really appreciate it at the time, but he played a big part in shaping my musical taste.
Townes Van Zandt was his doing. Thank you , Reidar!
If I needed you:
Version 2 by Townes (the song starts about two minutes into the video):
It is a popular song that is covered by a lot of artists. Here are a few of the best known ones:
Emmylou Harris and Steve Earle:
Emmylou in 1982, maybe the best cover version!
Don Williams had a hit with Emmylou Harris:
Very understandable, it’s a fantastic interpretation.
If I needed you, would you come to me?
Would you come to me for to ease my pain?
If you needed me, I would come to you.
I would swim the sea for to ease your pain.
Well the night’s forlorn and the morning’s born
And the morning’s born with the lights of love.
And you’ll miss sunrise if you close your eyes,
And that would break my heart in two.
last but not least, Townes Van Zandt again with the masterpiece if I Needed You:
It came out a few days ago so iy isn’t brand new, but it is so good I just had to present it here. Mixing good pop and nostalgia for the Jim Henson generation.
The Official Music Video for “Do It Anyway,” the first track from Ben Folds Five’s much anticipated album THE SOUND OF THE LIFE OF THE MIND…featuring the Fraggles from Jim Henson’s “Fraggle Rock”! Also starring Rob Corddry, Anna Kendrick & Chris Hardwick.
Just a fun video to start the weekend, and so cathcy, you’ll hum along in no time, this is perfect pop.
Directed by Phil Hodges, Ben Folds Five – Do it anyway:
