Running on Empty

Browne wrote it in 1976 while driving to the studio each day during The Pretender sessions. He told Rolling Stone he was always driving around with an empty tank, since the studio was only a few blocks away. He later said it was "an admission that your ideals are changing": doing what you always did, but for a different reason. Paul Nelson heard a stubborn duality of winning and losing in it, and Maury Dean read it as a comment on energy dependence.

The recording that opens Running on Empty was made live at Merriweather Post Pavilion in Columbia, Maryland, on 27 August 1977, with Danny Kortchmar, Craig Doerge, Leland Sklar and Russ Kunkel, Rosemary Butler and Doug Haywood singing, and a lap steel solo from David Lindley that is often counted among his signature moments. Edited down, it was released as a single in January 1978 with Nothing but Time on the B-side and reached number 11 on the Hot 100. Billboard heard fiery rock and roll that never lets up. It plays under the running montage in Forrest Gump, and the No Nukes film has Browne singing it alone at Madison Square Garden in 1979. In 2008 he sued John McCain, the Ohio Republican Party and the RNC over its use in an ad, and the case was settled in 2009 with a public apology.

Live

It is the song he has played most, close to 1,200 times by setlist.fm's count, and other artists, Billy Strings among them, have taken it on stage hundreds of times. Rolling Stone put it on its list of the 500 greatest songs in 2004. Bob Schneider recorded it for the 2014 tribute Looking Into You. The upload in the hypersongs web is the single edit of the Merriweather Post Pavilion recording, from Rhino's digital 45 pairing it with Nothing but Time.