09/14/2023
ON THIS DATE (49 YEARS AGO)
September 13, 1974 - Jackson Browne: Late for the Sky is released.
# ALL THINGS MUSIC PLUS+ 5/5
# Allmusic 5/5
# Rolling Stone (see original review below)
Late for the Sky is the third album by Jackson Browne, released on September 13, 1974. It reached #14 on the Billboard 200 Top LP's chart and was nominated for a Grammy Award in 1975. I
Jackson Browne's early career was inextricably linked to the singer-songwriter movement of the 70s, and Late for the Sky has proven to be one of the era's strongest and most enduring releases. Browne's reflective songwriting style attained a new level of maturity on songs such as "Fountain Of Sorrow" and "For A Dancer," the latter a strikingly literate meditation on death. The high points on Late for the Sky are the title track and "Before the Deluge," two brooding songs of personal and social apocalypse that bookend the album and seem to reflect the disillusionment and weather-beaten mood of the counter-cultural generation in the early '70s. The balance between Browne's gentle, emotive voice and the tasteful arrangements perfectly matches the incisive quality of the songwriting, making Late for the Sky one of Browne's strongest, and most consistent albums.
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COVER ART
Browne has publicly acknowledged that the acclaimed cover art for Late for the Sky was inspired by the 1954 painting "L'Empire des Lumieres" ("Empire of Light"), by Belgian surrealist René Magritte. The album itself contains the credit, "cover concept Jackson Browne if it's all r**t with Magritte." The original photograph was shot on a South Pasadena residential str**t, several miles from Browne's childhood Highland Park, California home. Designer and front cover photographer Bob Seldemann said, "I spoke to Jackson in 1980 and he told me he thought it was his favorite cover. Lest the jacket appear too funereal, a mood-defusing photo of a relaxed Jackson, almost smiling and looking as though he has a surprise to share, occupies a small square of the back cover." The title track was featured prominently in the 1976 Martin Scorsese film Taxi Driver. In his speech inducting Browne into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Bruce Springsteen called Late for the Sky Browne's "masterpiece" and referred to the car doors slamming at the end of "The Late Show".
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ORIGINAL ROLLING STONE REVIEW
Late for the Sky, Jackson Browne's third Asylum album, is his most mature, conceptually unified work to date. Its overriding theme: the exploration of romantic possibility in the shadow of the apocalypse. No contemporary male singer/songwriter has dealt so honestly and deeply with the vulnerability of romantic idealism and the pain of adjustment from youthful narcissism to adult survival. Late for the Sky is the autobiography of his young manhood.
The album's eight loosely constructed narratives rely for much of their impact upon stunning sections of aphoristic verse, whose central images, the antinomies of water and sand, reality and dreams, sky and road, inextricably connect them. Browne's melodic style, though limited, serves his ideas brilliantly. He generally avoids the plaintive harmonies of southern California rock ballads for a starker, more eloquent musical diction derived from Protestant hymns. Likewise his open-ended poetry achieves power from the nearly religious intensity that accumulates around the central motifs; its fervor is underscored by the sparest and hardest production to be found on any Browne album yet (Late for the Sky was produced by Browne with Al Schmitt), as well as by his impassioned, oracular singing style.
On side one, Browne tells bluntly about his personal conflict between fantasy and reality in erotic relationships, struggling with his quest for idyllic bliss. The title cut explores an affair at its nadir ("Looking hard into your eyes/There was nobody I'd ever known"), concluding with an image of the sky, the album's symbol for escape, salvation and death. "Fountain Of Sorrow" develops parallel themes of s*x and nothingness, fantasy and realism, as Browne, looking at the photograph of a former lover, recalls: "When you see through love's illusion, their lies the danger/And your perfect lover just looks like a perfect fool/So you go running off in search of a perfect stranger." In the chorus, highly romanticized s*xuality becomes a "fountain of sorrow, fountain of light." Later in the album the water images are developed into a larger metaphor for death and rebirth.
"Farther On" and "The Late Show" complete the first part of the song cycle. Locating the sources of Browne's exacerbated romaticism "in books and films and song," "a world of illulsion and fantasy," "Farther On" defines Browne's quest as a "citadel" in "a vision of paradise." Its desolate conclusion finds Browne alone and older, "with my maps and my faith in the distance, moving farther on." By "The Late Show," Browne is so absorbed in despair that if he "stumbled on someone real" he'd "never know." Midway in the song, however, he meets a lover and in an impulsive gesture they drive away from the past in the "early model Chevrolet" pictured on the album cover.
The second side of the album describes the precariousness of the journey, as Browne's sense of personal tragedy metamorphoses into a larger social apprehension. "The Road and the Sky," a jaunty rock song, reintroduces the water motif. "For A Dancer," which follows, is one of the album's two masterpieces, a meditation on death that harks back to "Song For Adam" on Browne's first album. But "For A Dancer" is not a lament; it calls for joyful procreation to combat metaphysical terror. Browne's graceful lyric, as fine as any he's written, finds its counterpart in music, an ethereal tango in which David Lindley's fiddle dances against Browne's vocal. A crisp little rock song, "Walking Slow," celebrates Browne's newfound domestic stability. "Before The Deluge," the album's summary cut, brings together in a comprehensive social context the themes of the rest of the album. The verses are linked by a moving secular prayer for music, shelter and spiritual sustenance: "Let creation reveal its secrets by and by/When the light that's lost within us reaches the sky." This chorus's final statement follows a verse so imagistically potent as to suggest literal prophecy:
And when the sand was gone
and the time arrived,
In the naked dawn
only a few survived.
And in attempts to understand a thing
so simple and huge,
Believed that they were meant to live
After the deluge.
- Stephen Holden (November 7, 1974)
TRACKS:
All songs by Jackson Browne
Side one
"Late for the Sky" – 5:36
"Fountain of Sorrow" – 6:42
"Farther On" – 5:17
"The Late Show" – 5:09
Side two
"The Road and the Sky" – 3:04
"For a Dancer" – 4:42
"Walking Slow" – 3:50
"Before the Deluge" – 6:18
