Jackson Browne

00:00:15 Speaker 1: Pushkin. In the nineteen seventies, Jackson Brown was known as one of the originators of the care free California classic rock sound, with hits like Doctor My Eyes and Running on Empty Looking. As his career progressed, Jackson Brown's knack for writing soul searching lyrics turned more political. He began to write protest songs that addressed weighty issues like environmental degradation in US foreign policy. Brown continues to use his music as a vehicle for change today. His latest album, Downhill from Everywhere, was inspired by a documentary about the Pacific garbage back and our impact on the planning. On today's episode, Bruce Headlam talks to Jackson Brown about how he is able to turn catastrophic headlines into palatable songs. Brown also talks about moving to New York City when he was eighteen and writing songs for the Velvet Undergrounds Nico. Brown also remembers the time his former label boss, David Geffen shut down his attempt to quote the Black Panthers Bobby Seal and a song. This is broken record liner notes for the digital Age. I'm justin Richmond. Here's Bruce Headlam and Jackson Brown. I want to talk about your new album. Of course, First of all, where did the title come from? It comes from an oceanographer named Captain Charles Moore, the guy that discovered the North Pacific gyre and all the plastic squirreling and the jar has become known as the Pacific garbage patch. He's the guy that sort of discovered it and sort of brought out to attention of the rest of the world. And in talking about the ocean and our impact on the ourc change says that's the ocean is downhill from everywhere, and that's where the title comes from. And it's really at the heart of what the song is talking about us humans impact on the planet. You know, this album it has political songs like that one the Dreamer. It's got other songs that deal with current issues. And this surprised me. It seemed like a very optimistic album to me. The personal song seemed very optimistic, which is not always something I associate with your music. It wasn't wistful or valedictory. Were you in a good mood when you when you wrote this album? Were you in a good place? This album got written over a period of years, so I think that that maybe I have a desire to be optimistic or to be be hopeful. Not optimistic, but to be hopeful. The act of writings song, I think I reflectively want to leave things in there'll be some light, some possibility for a positive outcome, you know. In still looking for something, Looking for Love, you're you know, minutes from downtown. There are the songs of somebody who's kind of in the game and enjoying it. The whole album has a sense of dealing with things that are interminable. They things that are going on and on and on, problems where they're before and are there now. Yeah, it's about moving forward, and it's about trying to find find your way, you know forward. As far as being in the game, you know, you got to think that you are, even if you're not, come on, you must be in the game. Please give us hope here to want to make music, you know, you have to have that's the thing, just that that you want to. You know, they still want to. I mean, it'd be easy to get tired of it. But I think I think that probably the reason I don't is I I don't do it all the time. I'm not I'm not releasing album after album, and you know, releasing an album every year or two. You know, it's just I mean, the song the Dreamer. I've been trying to write that many years ago, and it just sort of took a turn. I met this guy, Eugene Rodriguez, and showed him this old song idea I had, which began with the you know, like the Minutemen being down on the border enforcing you know, trying to you know, vigilantism, and it just turned into a song about about a young person come into this country and giving her future to this country, and that is so optimistic. There's so much hope in that in the in the midst of the debacle that is our immigration policy and the years of trying to deny you know, access to people who are fundamentally here before we were, and you know, to a great extent. You know, people have been coming from Mexico to California or Arizona, you know, since before they were in the Union. It's just like they're the best among US immigrants. My grandmother came here when she was sixteen, so there's a lot of there's a lot about this country that are the optimism that people have when they come here. Folded together with the difficulties they endure. But you know, it's it's a mixture of both, you know, hardship, optimism, you know, struggle in each all of these songs. I think you mentioned the Dreamer, and I'm wondering when you when you do write a song that way, you know, because your personal songs, people relate to them because the sort of commonality of emotions that people have and the dilemmas they face in life. When you're approaching a more political song, do you say, I want to write something about immigration because it's wrong? I mean, how do you get from there? How do you get from this sort of high level New York Times headline to the emotional heart of a song like that. Yeah, that's a good question because the thing that I've tried, I've tried to do in the past sometimes to try to broach a subject strategically and try to draw people into the subject and taught what matters to each of us. And there's the problem with anything political is if you're too oblique, they won't know what you're talking about. And if you're too direct, they run the risk of making people feel that they're being sort of scolded or lectured. Also, I told myself, look, I want this to sound like the way it would sound like if you and I were drinking in a bar and we're just talking about what's going on in the world, not that as if you're some sort of elevated place and lecturing people about something that should know about but dount or that they should care. But you know, you have to make people. You have to get to people where where they do care and where what they do know about. In the case of Downhill from Everywhere, it's not exactly it's not exactly political because there's no polemic. There is just like a bunch of compounding and sort of contrasting images, you know, the prison, the mall, factory, farming, the hospital. And the fun of it was to make it flow out of it so that these seem like extreme consciousness, and sometimes it was. But you have to make those words sound good with rock and roll. And if what I really wanted was a song that you don't have to listen to the words to at all, you would just listen. You might hear some of them going by while you're listening to the guitar part, or the or the drum based and the drums, and I just wanted to feel good. I decided not to talk. I mean, I had like a verse that was gonna you know, it wasn't like going to name Trump. I just didn't want a song with his name in it. I wasn't going to refer to him, but I was gonna be talking about like, you know, downhill from the White House, downhill from the dump, downhill from that's something, or the downhill from the biopsy and that suspicious lump and yeah, right, but that's I don't think that's the editor in me that said, Okay, you can put that aside. Keep looking. Do you think as a result of this last year, when you go back out in the road, are there songs of yours from your catalog? You say? You know, suddenly this makes sense now if I if I take this out in a way it might not have two years ago. I'm not sure the process of deciding what you're gonna play is a really involved saying. I'd say I'm more involved in with which of my old songs the audience wants to hear after having been shut down for this amount of time, In which of my new songs I can you know, I can I can expect to get a real, real strong listening to. You know, there were times when I went out and tried to play every every new song on an album in a set, and you wind up playing, you know, more than half the songs would be these new songs. And I got sort of chided by some of my friends, like, and people really come to hear you what they already know, and you might want to just like cut that down to two or three songs. And at the same time, I think that this is a really important time where people do want to know what's what's transpired. And these a lot of these songs were you know, written before and the pandemic, and they're about the last several years or their or their culminations. Some of the songs go back a lot longer than that. And Man of Fact, Downhill from Everywhere was the song I was writing for a long time. And what I think, it's probably not going to be apparent to anybody, you know, but how would anybody know? But I mean, I've got on my laptop screener, I've got like all these sound checks from trying to play that song. I play these things back and there are moments when, like I thought, Okay, that's the way the drums have to play this song. Well, that's or the time that Greg Lea's played this incredible like dang dann't get that deck out, this really great guitar leg. He figured it out all these sound checks where something happened and I go, oh yeah. And then there was the time where I cut the song and and I say, look, I'm I'm screwing us up. Let me just try to play my guitar black Jeff, you sing it and he's singing my keyboarders. The guy was singing this line down here from the water. Well, he's swinging in a certain way. He just hears things that way. He goes like don godd dump. So he's swinging the track that way with his la la laws whatever. He's singing to lead the band, whereas the melody really goes all got data and it's against the beat, which provides a kind of tension and you can get away with it, but it's not as in the I tried to convert all the phrasing to his phrasing, and that really didn't work, throwing off the words again and then coming back to Minka. I gotta go back to my Then I just realized, I said, just I can have him answer it. I can have him reaffirmed that rhythm with his vote Downhill from the fat from the band in the room, Downhill from the you know, so I gave. I wrote a bunch of lines for him to sing too, and Downhill. I thought, as cool as like getting my getting my singers to sing Downhill from the Anthropascene. I was gonna have one of us say, look it up downhill. You know it's fun because I'm writing for a band like I called in writing that song, I really called the guitar part from Greg and a vocal phrasing from Jeff. I mean a moment where Fritz was kind of channeling the Stones and trying to play this thing. Just make the song about music first, you know, And so do most songs. For you to start with lyrical ideas, it's usually some piece of lyric and music at the same time, I feel, or a little little bit of music at the same time. But it's usually a phrase. Yeah, but you're still you're a slow writer, aren't you. You've noticed, Yeah, what's the fastest you've ever written a song? One of the fast songs was on this album A little soon to say, came up pretty quickly. What's a little quickly for you? That I had this idea and a month later I really started to write it. And then in a matter of about a week or so, I had kind of you know, wow, yeah, stuff happens. I got a phone call in the middle of writing this verst and I got a phone from a friend of mine who's who I worked with, like my production guy, like I ever told him to do, but had that conversation with him. I just led me into this whole reassessment of my whole you know, like I didn't find much wisdom when I was when time was on my side. That verse came from like a feeling I had from a conversation on the while writing the song. It's not like I set out to say something. It's just you. It's a process of uncovering things that in you. You know, within you. We'll be right back with more from Jackson Brown after this break. We're back with more from Bruce Headlam and Jackson Brown. You are associated with Los Angeles in a way that few people are associated with places. You know, maybe Kurt Cobain and Seattle, or Willie Nelson in Austin, but you are this Los Angeles character. So I'm interested in that early part of your career when you left, when you went to New York to work. Can you tell me a bit about that, because it was Dylan who inspired you to a certain extent. And what was it like for you're very young a kid to leave LA and go to New York. Well, I grew up in LA until I was about thirteen. But then at the time that I went to New York, I've been living in Orange County. My family had moved out to Fullerton. You know. I kicked myself that I didn't go somehow get a job at Defender Factory and like have like a stash of sixties you know, stratocasters to show for it. But I was really, yeah, I was really immersed in folk music and Dylan, and continue to be immersed in roots music and folk music after Dylan. Sort of. See, there's a thing about folk music is that you learn a song and you make it your own. You either combine maybe you've combined Dave Van Rogg's version of stagger Lee with Mississippi John Hurt's version of Staggerly. You take the best of those versions and you put them together and to put it in your own. In fact, I wrote a verse a version of stagger Lye that in which I'm combine those versions and I'm quoting Bobby Seal, you know, the Black Panthers, you know, like Bobby Seals says, stagger Lee was the brother off the block whose actions had to had to speak for him because he couldn't relate to talk. Listen, all you millionaires is something you should know. He's his ship together. So I'm you gonna have to go? Is that a political song? The fact is that David Geffen heard that an he went, huh, women, what's wrong with millionaires? What's wrong? We wanted to be a millionaire And it didn't make my album to make the first album. But just so you know, like what I was referring to is that the fact that you made these folk songs speak for you and it wasn't just like summoning up an arcane song and rendering it faithfully from you know, we made have started with that. I always Joan Baena's incredible songs that she curated on her albums, you know, but she did something to them. She cast a spell on them that was brand new and traditional and ancient at the same time. So that's what we started happening. And Dylan, Dylan did it, you know, and they did it so well that you sort of, you know, led the whole procession off into like a brand new direction. And I always living in Orange County by the time that start happening, and when I got involved in folk music. Before that, I listened to my father's music in Dixie Land, so some of the great singers Eelaphus Gerald and man. In fact, we saw Dylan on the television one time. It was before first I ever saw him, and I was it was like a very short show and it was Dylan sitting on the edge of a stage somewhere. It's maybe one of the first appearances of him in in TV. And he was I said, wow, what is this? You know? My dad says, and he wasn't into folk music, but he said, this is the real thing. This is the real thing. He said. I knew guys in the army that sounded like this. This is he was stationed in Mississippi for a WI said, this sound reminds me of that guy sitting on the edge of his bed playing the guitar. In the barracks. You know this is like this is, And so he sort of validated Bob Dylan very early on for me at a time when and what happened to meeting, of course, is that all these songs that he had written were learned by everybody. And the thing is that the job still was to make it your own. So I started writing songs at that right around that same time. And what you write about what you know? You know? Your dad he what instrument to be playing. He played piano, but he loved horns, He loved the trumpet, and he loved the trombone. He played a lot of Jack Teagarden, and he would walk around the house playing the trombone, saying, listen, there's only three positions. Can you check out how many notes he's playing. But he's only never forget having like combinations of thin of keys and fingering you only they have that, that and that and then it's your lip. And so he's walked. He's fascinated with how the trombone is played. He's not he's not good at it. But he actually did one one time get to play with Jack Teagarden and he went up with Teagarden's tie and Tea Garden. Evidently Tea Garden like typed his tie. They left the jack had at six in the morning or something, and like te Garden had a stein. So he wanted him and it was it was like a tallest amount. It was like a for eyes possession of his Also a picture of him playing with Django Reinhard. He was a really good musician and he wasn't in rains band. He actually booked Ryan Hard for these parties and he would get to sit in Wow. So we I grew up with that sort of lore. But when folk music happened, it was taking on all this information about the world, about our history, and about who really is here, you know. So even though I lived in this like really sterile little tract home in Orange County with my family, I mean, the conduit and the lifeline to the to the world outside was music. A lot of musicians I've talked to their their fathers were jazz musicians, and often they didn't like their kids musical choices. My father. I remember my father coming to see my one of my gigs. I vaguely understood that that there wasn't a lot about my singing or my even my my my songs were not sophisticated. You know. It wasn't like he was. He was not going to get to cross the Jordan, you know, and come go off into the future with us. You know. He was like even in jazz, you know, he told him, you like, he said like, yeah, Miles Davis, Wow, you know what I thought? Really? Oh no, I thought, okay, well, you're definitely telling me where you're at. But we we diverged on so many things. He said, you and your friends think you're nonconformist. We didn't really, And then they were to use that where there wasn't the issue. He said, but you're gonna have to cut your hair, and you're gonna have to You're gonna want to raise a family, and then you're gonna have to get a job and cut your hair. And I thought, I don't think so. You know, so there are all ways in which that you don't necessarily have to follow your parents the dictates of their their their view. But at the same time he gave me, he gave me such an incredible love and appreciation for music, jazz, for for and an understanding of who's here terms of you know, racially, you know, the deities in our house were like I say, Ella Fitzgerald, and I vaguely understood that he didn't have that find an appreciation for what I was doing. He'd come to my gig and at the end of the gig he said, I don't lose that drummer. You know about all he could say. And he's right. I mean, like you'd think, you know, he really dug Russconsle's drumming. And but I had him come over and I wanted to send him down and play him the pretender. I mean, there's a song for him in the second half. He was asleep before we got to the second half, you know, and I just went, well, that's just about perfect. You know, he didn't hear he didn't hear Daddy's tune. No, he didn't wow when he talked about like cutting your hair and were those his resentments that he had to he wasn't resentful about it. He just thought that we were, you know, young and so on our wild oats, but that there was he was describing what he had done, which was he said he never thought he was a professional musician. He always thought of himself as an amateur, and that he had never really followed through, or that he'd gotten the job the jobs that he needed to do to have a family. But he also told me really wild stuff, like he enjoyed being in the army because he didn't have to think and to be to be fourteen and to hear that, it was like all I needed to know. That's okay, that kind of disqualifies you as a as an advisor, you know. But he also he'd say the coolest stuff, like one time he said he was over in my house, he was leaving. He said, well, play good. But you didn't have to say he is. He was an English teacher and a metic who correct us every night at the dinner table. We didn't have to learn grammar or any of the rules of because we were just forced to speak correctly all the time, not forced, but just admonished if we didn't. And I said to him, play good. What do you mean, dude, don't you mean play well? He said, yeah, but I've never heard of musicians say play well, play good? So how old were you then when you went to New York? I was eighteen, and you'd been playing around la and then what took you to New York? I've been playing out in Orange County, you know, coffee houses and stuff, and I was living in Orange County. My friends would drive into New York and there was like a they needed a third person to share with the gas and share in the driving. We made that trip in three and a quarter days. You know, it was like just straight through driving around the clock. We were delivering a car to my friend's family up in I think it was up in Niagara Falls that he had to deliver this rambler American station wagon, and so we drove it straight to New York and went to the another friend's house who was living on the on the Lower East Side. So I had a well, yeah, I was from I was from a set of players and that hung around a club called the Paradox in tust And the reason they called it the Paradox was it was traditional music for contemporary minds. Is what the guy's business cards sent. And in a way it was in that guy. The guy that owned the club sang a lot of Hank william and that he and his partner their dream was to have a club where people came and made music. And in that club I heard Sonny Cherry Brown, McGee, Jack Elliott, all these musicians that would come and play the Ash Grove in LA would always be looking for another gig, and there was a gig out in Orange County that they could go play a weekend, you know, the ad and have to fray the costs of coming west in the first place. So there was a really strong folk scene and there were a bunch of songwriters, and these guys hired my friend Steve Noon and two he got a gig there. It was really a big deal that one of us, one of us sort of rug rats, were like, I had a gig, he had, Like we could go hear each other's and Steve sang some songs in mine and sang songs that he had written with Great Copeland. And these are my mentors, you know, guys that were two years older than me, but let me hang with them. But when we went to New York, one of the things that happened in that first week or two that was there is that Tim Buckley had a gig at the at the Dam, and Niko was on the billing and she was being accompanied by Sterling Morrison and apparently sometimes it would be Sterling, sometimes it would be lou Reid, sometimes it would be John Cale but she was leaving the Velvet underground and to be a solo artist. And I think that it was the vibe. I don't really know this for sure, but the vibe was that it was all something that they were all agreed about. I say, she stayed in the Velvets might have been a more mainstream band, you know. On the other hand, I don't think they care that much about that. Webb's mainstream. They were actually like real outliers. But I think that they were helping her along with her transition to a solo artist. So she offered Tim Bucket the job of a company or because I don't think that I don't maybe didn't go well with her that one night it was one guy, one night it was another guy. So she wanted her own accompanies, and he came in and said that there was this shot. He said, I don't think she understands that I have like a career that I'm like, he doesn't know about me and know I've got a gig in Boston next week. I'm not you know, I'm not going to become her accompany. And he knew I was destitute. I came to New York with fifty bucks in my pocket and a Signal Oil credit card that I could use if it was an emergency, my mom's credit card, you know, and without without clothes for winter. It was the snow on the ground, and I was wearing these loafers, you know, and like, I don't know what people thought about us with California, like wearing T shirts and loafers and stuff in the snow, and like what, you know, what are you doing? I had that job for just a little while. It didn't didn't last very long. I wanted wanting to go back home, and but you gave you gave her some songs like these Days, which she made it. Yeah, during that time, that song that that herd Chelsea Girl record was recorded and I was on a session. I mean we recorded what we did. I mean, she had learned three of my songs and they're they're on that record. And I also accompanied her on a Tim Harden song that where Tim Harden wrote a song about Lenny Bruce, a Dylan song called keep It with Mind, which no one had ever heard before. It was like she she was curating songs the way really. I mean, I compare her to Judy Collins, because Judy Collins was the one who would make an album was something before we were coming to New York. I mean a song of her record of her lot was her album in which she had Circle Game and an Obscure Donovan song, a Leonard Collins song, a Jacques Brell song. Judy Collins was really like curating songs and presenting them, you know, and as a singer and as a stylist, and really nobody thinks of her this way, of course, but that's what Niko was doing. She had collected a bunch of songs. She had lou Reed songs, you know, police Kick and Stomp, Young Love plus runs through matted here. I remember these songs. Loui Reid was as that he was on the he was on the session I was on and that when I say on the session, it was just it was just me and him and she recorded the songs that in that day and it was Tom Wilson, the great great Columbia staff producer would produce Bob Dylan. I don't know if he knew what to make of you know, what to do as a producer. But but what one thing they did was they took all these songs that were basically sung that she sang with one person playing guitar, and the day I was there, it was like the song that I accompanied her on, the song that she did with lou Reid. Then later they put strings on everything, which Leco hated. She thought that was like I think she thought it was kind of like an easy solution to like what to do with these songs. It was like a kind of one size fits all. It was a thing that has mastered everything. But I think it resulted some of these songs like These Days and Fairest of the Seasons really benefited by having the strength of string. Arrangements were great. Chelsea Girls has had a kind of longevity and a kind of there was a there's a moment there that was sort of captured. So why didn't you want to stay? I guess that was just all I'm sick, you know. And when I think about it, what would have happened that I stayed isn't intriguing question for me, because I probably would have gotten in a band all the way earlier than sooner than I did. I would have been an East Coast musician. I would have been exposed to more kinds of music. But when I did, though, I mean when I came back, I tried out for this band called the General Soul, and there in that same audition I met Jesse Ed Davis. And also in that same that same sort of audition session was this guy Leroy Marinell who later wrote co wrote Whereols of London with Warren Zevon and a couple other songs. So, I mean, I was I was growing, you know, I just go here, go there. On the way home from the airport, there was a leaked version of Sergeant Pepper playing on the radio. Then it wasn't supposed to be played, but somebody had this I think b Mitchell reads. I mean, he had this copy of that he'd been given by one of the Beatles. Then he just couldn't help himself. He played it on his shofl people going to the Beatles run caft D and a week later the album came out. But I mean, all these momentous things from me to be hearing a day on the life and she's leaving home on the way home from an airport. But it was it was exciting time for me. I was just you know, writing songs, trying to write songs. I like I had started the song a child in these hills when I was in New York because it was out of homesickness. It's like, you know, it's about being from a more pastoral place. You know. We'll be right back with more from Jackson Brown. We're back with the rest of Bruce Headlam's interview with Jackson Brown. It's interesting to think about what kind of songwriter you would have been had you stayed there, right, different influences, different well, you know what I mean. Out in Orange County where my friends and I were, you know, like we're practically a little like squatters. I mean, somebody to rent a house and then there'd be like twenty people, you know. But they were really into the Velvet Underground much more than I was. When I was in New York. They got into the Velvet Underground and played that stuff all the time. So I never really like got the whole LA New York. The differences. The differences are more apparent to me now, but at the time I didn't think that you were you know, and everybody I met in New York wanted to come to California. I you know, they find out that I was from LA and they say, oh, yay, I want to go to la, let's go. I got a car, you want to go. I'll be looking at this girl with a Mustang and thinking, yeah, I want to go. But it was an exciting time. Hey, I was eighteen and there was a lot of world unfolding wherever I went. I'm interested if you could go back and talk to her eighteen year old self about writing. I'd say what Dwayne Aldman eventually did say to me, like this folk music thing, that's okay, and you do it really well. It's okay, but you need to be in a band, brother, Yeah, you need to play these songs with a drummer. Come on, man, you're in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. But you have the single best induction speech I do, even if it did really eclipse me, it right, And I think about me was a clip by that speech? No, no, no, not at all, not at all. Now, everybody remembers the first part of that speech, and it's Bruce Springsteen describing how when he would play with you, you would get all the great looking girls looking at you on stage, and the street band would only get men and, as he said, not very good looking man. But that's the part people remember. But I think the heart of the speech. Do you mind if I just play you a little clip at the heart of the speech? Is that? Okay? Jackson Brown gave us paradise lost. I always imagine what if Brian Wilson, long after he'd taken a bite of that orange that the serpent offered to him. What if you married that nice girl and Caroline no I was figured that she was pregnant anyway. And what if he moved into the valley and had two sons. One of them would have looked and sounded just like Jackson Brown. Kane, of course, would have been Jackson's brother in arms, Warren's Evan. I love your Warren, But Jackson to me, Jackson to me was always the tempered voice of Abel, toiling in the vineyards, here to bear the earthly burdens, confronting the impossibility of love, here to do his father's work. Jackson's work was really California pop gospel. Listen to the chord changes that rock me on the water before the del You just gospel through and through, Okay. Other than he tried to upstage you on your night. I mean, I do think it's one of the great speeches I've ever heard about anything. I'm interested in your reaction to that. I was blown away, it was. It was also so funny, but I was, you know, my reaction, you know, it didn't escape him. My notice that there was a camera on me watching him say this stuff, you know, but it was it was really, it was, it was. It was huge. You know. See, for the longest time, I didn't know how to describe what I did. I don't know. I didn't know that anybody how many people really got what I did, or how to how to describe it or what to say. The idea that someone else was going to stand there and sum it up or say in so many words what it is that I do was really interesting to me. You know, the word genius doesn't mean like that you're smarter than everybody. Means that there's one particular thing that is your genius. You know. One time I told a girlfriend of mine this, you should, oh, don't worry, you're not one. But the thing is that whatever it is that you're particularly good at, I have somebody describe that it's as incredible gift. And that's somebody that I think so much of that and it's meant so much to me that it was just a really overwhelming thing to have happened. At the same time, it was done with such love and such an such an embrace. It was incredible. I find that a little scary. That speech almost not scary, but it puts a huge burden on you to me, like you're the responsible one. You're the guy who was like who you know, witnessing the failure of love, you know, the impossibility of love and trying to put together the fragments of our life. And I thought, oh, man, poor Jackson Brown, Like but you almost I had read recently that you said you were writing songs when you're a kid, but you probably would have had more fun had you just gone out in a garage band and played Gloria for three hours the way every other kid was doing. Yeah, I still want to do that. I've I've had to have some offers after I wherever that was Predator or so Setllite, people say like, hey, we want to play Gloria with you. That's there's something about that. Look, that's just a component that I that got left out being unbanded in high school. But I didn't. I didn't. I liked Gloria, but I didn't really admire that the fact it was really hard place for songs to grow and for lyrics, lyrics to be heard, very hard. So I saw I gravitated to the listening rooms where people really really listen and thought about what they're listening to. And so yeah, the thing is that there's joy. Rock and roll is so full of joy, and it's so full of the need, the desire for freedom and the and the willingness to risk everything for it. You know, there is meaning in the sound of a ride symbol. There's a way in which somebody does a particular rhythmical thing, or like a guitar chord or way in which played that is really more power and there's more there's more meaning in it than in the meaning of the words. Well, there's as much. So which you I want both of those? I want this, I want that's that's also like what I was trying to do in Downhill from Everywhere. I want you to listen to the way these guys are playing this. And we really worked on which just that's my garage band there, you know the thing that I've I fish just to have the words engage you in a place where you care. That's what I want to do. And to do that you have to hear them. I just I'll just ask you one more question about that, because we've determined that you've got a new album that's hard rocking and you're back into game, all all the nice things I want to say about your record. When you write, you do write political songs? Do you start out an anger? Sometimes? Yeah? I met this guy wanted He it's a punk rocker. I can't remember his name now, and he was telling me, you know, I like your music. Okay, you know, I think, but you know, I think it should be a little angrier. You know, I think you should be angrier. I just doug that he was willing to talk to me because it was that's the saying with which all this enables. Days of shoegazing, like introspective songwriters were sort of swept aside by punk music. But yeah, I think that, after all, there's plenty of stuff that I'm angry about. I think that I have something similar. But it's not about getting the anger out, but hope in I want to engage about what's what's going on in this life and and also try to at least chart a course or in some way, you know, direct myself and whoever else is listening to a possibility that things might be could be improved upon, you know, and really that always comes down to improving yourself. And first, you know, are you more hopeful now than you've been in the past? Well, the whole like that. The Haitians say, you know, lespark Feviv, hope makes life. That that's such a simple anguage Haitian creole. But I mean what they mean is like, hope makes life possible. So you know, I'm hopeful as a motherfucker. You know, I'm trying to I'm trying to find it wherever I look. You know, I think we've got your next album title right, hopeful as a MOTIFU listen. Thank you so much for this. It's been just fantastic than the left for the conversation. I really enjoyed it. Thanks to Jackson Brown for talking about his career and the inspiration behind his new album, Downhill from Everywhere. You can check out that album plus all of our favorite Jackson Brown songs at Broken Record podcast dot com. Be sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel at YouTube dot com slash Broken Record Podcast, where you can find all of our new episodes. You can follow us on Twitter at broken Record. Broken Record is produced with help from Leah Rose, Jason Gambrel, Martin Gonzalez, Eric Sandler, and Jennifer Sanchez, with engineering help from Nick Chafen. Our executive producer is mio Leabell. Broken Record is a production of Pushkin Industries. If you love this show and others from Pushkin, consider subscribing to Pushkin Plus. Pushkin Plus is a podcast subscription that offers bonus content and unindrupted ad free listening for four ninety nine of a month. Look for Pushkin Plus on Apple Podcasts subscriptions, and please remember to share, rate, and review us on their podcast That a theme musics by Kenny Beats. I'm justin Richmond, h