Jackson Browne

One of the reasons that Jackson Browne's first album is among the most auspicious debuts in pop music history is that it doesn't sound like a debut. Although only 23, Browne had kicked around the music business for several years, writing and performing as a member of the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band and as Nico's backup guitarist, among other gigs, while many artists recorded his material. So, if this doesn't sound like someone's first batch of songs, it's not. Browne had developed an unusual use of language, studiedly casual yet full of striking imagery, and a post-apocalyptic viewpoint to go with it. He sang with a calm certainty over spare, discretely placed backup – piano, acoustic guitar, bass, drums, congas, violin, harmony vocals – that highlighted the songs and always seemed about to disappear. In song after song, Browne described the world as a desert in need of moisture, and this wet/dry dichotomy carried over into much of the imagery.

On his third album, Jackson Browne returned to the themes of his debut record (love, loss, identity, apocalypse) and, amazingly, delved even deeper into them. "For a Dancer," a meditation on death like the first album's "Song for Adam," is a more eloquent eulogy; "Farther On" extends the "moving on" point of "Looking Into You"; "Before the Deluge" is a glimpse beyond the apocalypse evoked on "My Opening Farewell" and the second album's "For Everyman." If Browne had seemed to question everything in his first records, here he even questioned himself. "For me some words come easy, but I know that they don't mean that much," he sang on the opening track, "Late for the Sky," and added in "Farther On," "I'm not sure what I'm trying to say." Yet his seeming uncertainty and self-doubt reflected the size and complexity of the problems he was addressing in these songs, and few had ever explored such territory, much less mapped it so well. "The Late Show," the album's thematic center, doubted but ultimately affirmed the nature of relationships, while by the end, "After the Deluge," if "only a few survived," the human race continued nonetheless. It was a lot to put into a pop music album, but Browne stretched the limits of what could be found in what he called "the beauty in songs," just as Bob Dylan had a decade before.

Theoretically, assembling a Jackson Browne greatest-hits collection would be easy, but The Next Voice You Hear: The Best of Jackson Browne proves that isn't necessarily the case. Boasting 13 tracks, plus two new songs, The Next Voice You Hear contains some of Browne's biggest hits – "Doctor My Eyes," "Running on Empty," "Somebody's Baby," "Tender Is the Night" – but it leaves just as many off, including "Rock Me on the Water," "Here Come Those Tears Again," "Stay," "Boulevard," "Lawyers in Love," and "For America." Of course, singles only told half the story with Browne, and many of his greatest songs were only available as album tracks. Therefore, it makes sense that album cuts like "These Days," "Late for Sky," and "The Pretender" are present, but there are still a number of equally good, if not better, cuts that are left off. As a result, The Next Voice You Hear is merely adequate for casual Browne fans, but it's nowhere near definitive.

Jackson Browne went on tour in 1977 with a remarkable group of musicians to create an album about the road, on the road. The result was Running On Empty, a musical portrait of life on tour that is as brutally honest as it is achingly beautiful. Paul Nelson wrote in his original Rolling Stone review of the album that "Browne has consciously created a documentary, as brightly prosaic as it is darkly poetic, with a keen eye for the mundane as well as the magical."

Running on Empty is the fifth album by American singer-songwriter Jackson Browne. Released in 1977, the album reached #3 on the Billboard Pop Albums chart in 1978 and stayed on the charts for 65 weeks. The single for the title track, "Running on Empty", peaked at #11 and the follow-up single, "The Load-Out"/"Stay", reached #11 on the Billboard Pop Singles chart. The song "Running on Empty" was included in the film Forrest Gump. On November 15, 2005, Elektra/Rhino issued a remastered version with the following additional tracks: 11. "Cocaine Again" and 12. "Edwardsville Room 124" on Disc 2 of the package, which is a DVD Audio version of the album's track lineup that features a 5.1 surround sound mix, among other bonus items, such as video montages and lyrics.