Jackson Browne

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.

Love Is Strange: En Vivo con Tino is, simply put, a double CD that documents Jackson Browne's and David Lindley’s short Spanish tour of 2006. But it’s actually far more than that. While the song titles may be familiar to fans of both men, they don’t begin to tell the musical story on display here. Lindley and Browne were accompanied on all dates by the great flamenco percussionist, rock drummer, and producer Tino di Geraldo, and on select concerts by well-known Spanish musicians flutist Carlos Nunéz, vocalists Kiko Veneno and Luz Casal, banduria player Javier Mas, and others.