Jackson Browne

Early songs

Clyde Jackson Browne was born in Heidelberg, West Germany, in 1948 to an American serviceman stationed there, and grew up in Los Angeles at Abbey San Encino in Highland Park, a house his grandfather designed and built. After the family moved to Orange County he began writing songs at fourteen, the first inspired by Bob Dylan's You're No Good. He later judged most of those early songs mawkish and derivative. He played the Paradox club, wrote These Days at sixteen, and graduated from Sunny Hills High School in Fullerton in 1966.

That year he spent a few months in the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, and before he turned eighteen he was a staff writer for Elektra's publishing company, Nina Music, in Greenwich Village. He backed Tim Buckley and Nico, and Nico recorded three of his songs, These Days among them, on Chelsea Girl (1967). Back in Los Angeles in 1968 he formed a folk band with Ned Doheny and Jack Wilce and met Glenn Frey. Elektra signed him as an artist and soon let him go.

Asylum

In 1971 David Geffen became his manager and signed him to the new Asylum label. His debut, Jackson Browne (1972), often called Saturate Before Using, gave him a US number eight single in Doctor My Eyes, and the Eagles broke through the same year with Take It Easy, which he wrote with Frey. David Lindley, on lap steel, fiddle and slide, played on every Browne album from For Everyman (1973) to Hold Out (1980) and toured with him. Late for the Sky (1974) was his first top twenty album. Browne said it was about relationships and what you hope your life will become, and Bruce Springsteen later said no album better caught the long afterburn of the sixties.

The Pretender and the road

His son Ethan was born to Phyllis Major in 1973, and the couple married in 1975. Major died by suicide in 1976, while he was making The Pretender, and he stopped work for a time. He told MOJO in 2015 that the songs were all written before her death except Sleep's Dark and Silent Gate. Her mother, Nancy Farnsworth, co-wrote Here Come Those Tears Again. Produced by Jon Landau and released in November 1976, the album reached number five in the US. It runs from the title song, which he described as asking whether the life you are living is the one you thought you were headed for, to Linda Paloma, played by Mexican musicians on harp, guitarron and vihuela.

Running on Empty (1977) was a different kind of live album. Recorded on tour in the late summer of 1977, on stage, backstage, in hotel rooms and on the bus, it held only songs he had never released, including covers for the first time. He had first planned to re-record older songs, but playing new ones to audiences changed his mind. With Lindley and the session unit known as The Section behind him, it reached number three, and its title song became the song he plays most. Around the same time he produced Warren Zevon's first two Asylum albums and Lindley's El Rayo-X.

Causes and later years

He played an antinuclear concert at the Seabrook site in 1978, and after Three Mile Island in 1979 he co-founded Musicians United for Safe Energy with Bonnie Raitt and John Hall, staging the No Nukes concerts at Madison Square Garden that September. Hold Out (1980), with Of Missing Persons, written for Lowell George, was his only US number one album. Somebody's Baby, from the Fast Times at Ridgemont High soundtrack, reached number seven in 1982, his highest-charting single. Lawyers in Love, Lives in the Balance and World in Motion followed through the eighties, then six more studio albums up to Downhill from Everywhere (2021), the last three on his own Inside Recordings.

Springsteen inducted him into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2004, praising the emotional power packed into each line. The Rock Hall calls him "the quintessential Seventies singer-songwriter." He entered the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2007, a tribute album, Looking Into You, gathered Springsteen, Raitt, Don Henley and Lucinda Williams among others in 2014, and in 2018 he became the first artist to receive the Gandhi Peace Award. Lindley died in 2023, and Browne called him his friend and teacher. Ethan died in 2025. In September 2026 Browne released a remixed and remastered Time the Conqueror, with one vocal sung again and new drum and bass tracks.