Holly Gleason has written for ROLLING STONE, THE LA TIMES, NY TIMES, MUSICIAN, HITS and NO DEPRESSION. She is the author of WOMAN WALK THE LINE: How The Women of Country Music Changed Our Lives, the 2017 Belmont Book Award winner. The 2019 CMA Media Achievement winner, she is at work on PRINE ON PRINE: Encounters and Interviews for Chicago Review Press.
Before there was woke, there was Jackson Browne. Part of the Laurel Canyon singer/songwriter wave that continued the Byrds, Joni Mitchell and the Mamas & the Papas introspection, he joined Linda Ronstadt, the Eagles, Warren Zevon, and JD Souther to carve out a slightly more taut examination of the human heart, the ties that bind and tides that draw us apart.
For Everyman, Late for the Sky, The Pretender. They all shared an architecture that drew people in for their ache, their want and their ability to examine the shadows without disturbing the darkness.
As importantly, Browne, alongside Graham Nash, Bonnie Raitt and John Hall with their 1979 MUSE Concerts at Madison Square Garden with Bruce Springsteen, Rufus with Chaka Khan, the Doobie Brothers and more , ushered in an awareness of social issues that permeated general culture over the last five decades. Whether Native American rights, Greenpeace, Latin American, and Haitian causes, environmental concerns, inner city academic and creative initiatives, the preternaturally youthful musician continues merging awareness with music in a way to arouse and inspire.
Downhill From Everywhere feels like a classic Browne album, equal parts terse rock & roll matched with beautifully rendered piano ballads. The writing is direct and searching. Understanding nothing loses listeners faster than a lecture, he’s threaded his truth with something far more intriguing, seeking clarity as he looks for hope in such divisive times.
“Hope is continually assailed by the circumstances we’re living through,” he begins calling from his California home, “and I find there times that I just can’t write at all, so maybe those are the times I can’t find that hope. I just have such... I’m still trying to wrap my head around the fact that so many people dispute science, and even dispute the tenets of democracy. “All throughout the history of our country, there are attempts to shut it down or to circumvent it or to gain it. But never so openly and aggressively as now. The thing is when I look at that...” Conversation turns to a song he’s begun. We laugh. It’s too soon to discuss what can’t yet be heard. “It’s part of life, though. There has to be hope.”
Photo Credit- Henry Diltz 1970s
Hope amongst the ruins, or the impending ruination is a tricky thing. More than even a balance, there’s an inherent hope and fire inside all of us that is hard to extinguish.
“Actually, my oldest son Ethan had told me a few years ago, he said, ‘Dad, this is what humans are good at. We adapt.’ And it’s true. Throughout the history of humankind, there have been a series of circumstances in which they narrowly escaped extinction.”
Again, on the brink. Browne’s Downhill’s title track’s metaphor and inspiration traces the impact of decades of trash collecting in our oceans, creating plastic landfills that poison the water and destroy the ecosystem. It is also a song of how our own lives dissolve from lack of attention, unwillingness to deal and certain kinds of seemingly invisible momentum.
In a nod to the interconnection of it all, he names off Columbine, K Street, the grocery store, the silver screen, the vineyard, the funeral home, the Russian doll, the theme park, the NRA, the GOP and the ICE as places that are all downhill. When you pull back, it’s more than the ripple effect. He knows it’s something we don’t stop long enough to consider.
But beyond the propulsive rhythm, the “downhill from...” device allows him to stack places and notions. But there’s also the truth all these things move towards. What the ocean provides is more than a place for fish to swim and ships to cross. As the chorus posits:
Do you think of the ocean as yours? Because you need the ocean to breathe
Every second breath you take, It’s coming from the sea...
Photo Credit- Dylan Coulter
As Browne explains, “Downhill From Everywhere is really strong and tough, and I wanted it to be really engaging like my favorite rock bands are, like the Stones. I just want it to be pleasing (to the ear), because it won’t work if it’s just a linear song making linear sense and you have to listen to it; there’s something not very communicative.
“I juxtaposed images that aren’t linear, almost being said in a succession of posed questions... I like imagery and language, what they can do. The thing about music, as David Lindley always says, ‘It’s supposed to sound good’.”
“So, I wanted to put those elements in, because it’s very hard to write about plastic; but at the bottom of every one of these images is plastic. They produce or employ plastic, and in the end, (the plastic) winds up in the ocean, swept along by rivers going to the sea and dumped there, or carried there by people.”
Browne pauses, letting the listener catch up. “The ocean is the receptacle for all we do, chemically. And the ocean is dying. The oceans is very, very compromised and depleted; over-fished and completely compromised by the chemicals and the waste. Like I say in the song, ‘Every second breath you take...’ Every second gulp of oxygen comes from the ocean.
“If there are dead spots and you want to sound the alarm, I guess as a strategy, putting a few facts in the song, describing the effect on the world and each other, that’s a way.
“The thing about rock and roll is you don’t have to think about this if you don’t want. You should be able to just listen to the guitars and be happy. Or hopefully, you hear something that makes sense, that’s not necessarily frontal lobe, just something that happens internally. You can begin to heal and see the world around you.”
Hear. Heal. See. Simple as that, simple as a song that you can’t help feeling as it goes by.
