Jackson Browne: Summoning a Sky Blue and Black

“[With ‘Arms of the Night’] we wrote it in a key too high, and it took forever to figure out how to play it. It’s magic. It’s mysterious how a particular change will bring stuff out of you, and you’ll begin saying stuff…and you won’t know where it’s going or what you’re trying to say.

“It’d be so much easier if you knew what you wanted to write about and where you wanted to arrive, but it just doesn’t happen to work that way for me. It’s more like an oracle. The things that come out of your subconscious are much more capable of conveying the truth of the situation than what you’re consciously able to summon.

“It was a challenge to try to figure out who I was talking to, because it’s one of those cases where I do a lot of talking to you, but I’m really talking to myself about myself. I like the ambiguity of the song…I’m either talking to someone who has betrayed me, or I’m talking to myself about having betrayed myself. It’s sort of left open, and I meant to leave it ambiguous.”

Traces of what could be, veins of possibility in rocks of finite absolute-it is a work of reckoning from a man who first arrived on AM radio in 1972 with the plaguing “Doctor My Eyes,” with its bubbling piano and seemingly jubilant confession that the state of what he sees has erased his ability to “not know,” the very condition that has allowed a consumerist me-mine-disco-apocalypse to flourish.

“Time comes when everything you ever thought you knew,” Browne laments in ‘The Drums of War’ as the track surges up around him, “comes crashing down and flames rise up in front of you…”

It’s about recognizing that there is often more to even the truth than you see…the idea that the enemy is defined by who’s in charge of the story, that profits can come in many forms and that the Constitution is only worth the people who enforce it. For a pacifist, the tables turn significantly.

… Who gives the orders, the order to torture?
Who gets to no bid contract the future?
Who lies, then bombs, then calls it an error?
Who makes a fortune from fighting terror?
Who is the enemy trying to crush us?
Who is the enemy of truth and justice?
Who is the enemy of truth and freedom?
Where are the courts now that we need them?
Why is impeachment not on the table?
We better stop them while we are able…

Quietly eating Cuban pork, plantains and frijoles negros, Browne is philosophical. If he is a voice of social conscience, he’s also a man trying to find his place in the world. Never one to wear a cape and leap issues with total fractiousness, he admits his own personal evolution is integral to his sense of wholeness.