The Jackson Browne Lyric That Took a Satirical Look at the Cold War

We, as music fans, are all guilty of it. When a musician releases music that we love, we tend to freeze them in that image. If that musician tries to move on to something new, we have a hard time reconciling this novel approach with how we envision them in our minds.

Jackson Browne experienced that phenomenon more than most when he started writing material in the 1980s that deviated from the sensitive, relationship-focused songs of his ’70s heyday. It’s why songs like “Lawyers in Love,” as funny and biting today as it was when it was released in 1983, don’t quite get a fair shake.

A Satirical Shift

Close listeners probably noticed political and social concerns creeping into Jackson Browne’s work well before that shift became quite so pronounced. Songs like “Before the Deluge” (the environment) and “The Pretender” (materialism) had been issue-oriented in their way, albeit not quite so obvious about it.

Browne’s involvement in causes like Musicians United for Safe Energy also signaled a desire to use his talents to speak to the times. But he hadn’t quite thrown all his musical weight into topical material to that point. Truth be told, the Lawyers in Love album in 1983 still hedged its bets a bit, with love songs like “Tender Is the Night” very much a part of Browne’s repertoire.

But the choice of the title track as the album’s lead single was an indication of where Browne’s head and heart were at the time. The song indulges in some black humor to get its point across about how the American population’s preoccupation with the Cold War and Russia at the time the song was released had become all-encompassing, to the detriment of other glaring issues.

That Browne intended the song as satire was somewhat lost on most of the listening public. Maybe that’s because he did too good a job in packaging the message. “Lawyers in Love,” with its thumping beat, a sha-la-la chorus, and a thrilling modulation featuring Craig Doerge’s wall of synthesizers, is among the catchiest uptempo numbers of Browne’s career.

Behind the Meaning of “Lawyers in Love”

Browne sings from the perspective of an average American, somewhat deluded by the news that’s thrown in front of him every night into believing the apocalypse was nigh: I can’t keep up with what’s been going down / I think my heart must just be slowing down. This poor sap feels a little too much: Among the human beings, in their designer dreams / Am I only the one who hears the screams?

He imagines a scenario where the direst of predictions come true to Biblical proportions: God sends his spaceships to America, the beautiful / They land at six o’clock and there we are, the dutiful. The zombified masses don’t know how to respond: Eating from TV trays / Tuned in to Happy Days / Waiting for World War III while Jesus slaves.

In the final verse, Browne’s voice, now a few notches higher to both match the music and register the rising angst of his character, belts out the outcome: Ooh, last night I watched the news from Washington, the Capitol / The Russians escaped while we weren’t watching them. All that work fighting the Cold War for nothing: Now we’ve got all this room / We’ve even got the moon.

Throughout the song, the “Lawyers in Love” phrase keeps popping up, a representation of the strange mix of emotion and upward mobility that seemed to pass for the human race. Jackson Browne gave listeners a taste of his topical concerns on this heady song before he’d move on to the main course of his overtly political material for the remainder of the decade.

Photo by Gary Gershoff/Getty Images