Not Slant Enough 1 comments

By Brian Volck

The cover of Jackson Browne’s new CD, Time the Conqueror, features a black and white photo of the singer looking out from reflective glasses, his beard mostly white, his cryptic half-smile lying in that no man’s land between smugness and self-mockery. Compare that image to the one on Browne’s 1972 self-titled debut (aka Saturate Before Using) and it’s clear time’s done something to the man.

The new songs are recognizably Browne’s, with infectious melodies and catchy hooks compensating for pedestrian drum tracks and the inevitable realization that this is not his finest work. Of course, it’s rather much to ask anyone to reproduce the creativity of For Everyman or Late for the Sky (few marriages of lyric complexity and driving melody are so nearly perfect as “Fountain of Sorrow”) or the electric immediacy of Running on Empty.

But Time the Conqueror is not a bad album. It’s grown on me with repeated listening. The opening, title track is solid and inventive, as are one or two others (and there’s one gem, about which I’ll say more soon). Nevertheless, a “been there; done that” feeling hangs over most of these tunes.

Some reviewers have suggested that Browne devotes too many songs to his political concerns. That, I think, misses the point. If an artist finds a war unjust or national policies absurd, why shouldn’t his art reflect that conviction? And who would deny the stark beauty of such political songs as Bob Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind,” U2’s “Sunday, Bloody Sunday,” or Jan Krist’s vastly underappreciated “Curious”?

To my mind, what plagues this new album is overdirectness and a bit too much sincerity. There’s a redeeming irony to much of “Going Down to Cuba” but “The Drums of War,” “Where Were You?” and the utopian hymn “Far From the Arms of Hunger,” seem to suggest a Manichaean world in which there’s one, clearly correct side.

You don’t need to lecture this reluctant Christian pacifist that the war in Iraq’s been a disaster, nor do I need instruction in the societal injustices exposed after Katrina. It’s not so different in Contemporary Christian Music: I don’t require some rock star wannabe’s musical catechesis on the saving power of Jesus. What I keep hoping for and rarely finding in this collection is indirection, telling the truth—however urgent it may be—slant.

That, and the awareness that whatever sins I condemn are precisely the ones I know from the inside. In recognizing my complicity in whatever evils I hate, I lose the rather too attractive self-indulgence of righteous anger. Good riddance.

That’s why the new song, “Live Nude Cabaret,” (which is not nearly as salacious as the title suggests) is such a standout. Above a langorous, world-weary melody punctuated by intriguing chord changes, Browne confesses:

I went to the Live Nude Cabaret
To see what I could see
And I saw the ladies dancing
And I guess that they saw me
Neither did I vanquish, nor surrender to desire
But what I saw revealed to me
Was just more fuel (up)on the fire

This is painful honesty coming from a man whose often chaotic sexual biography has played out in tabloid pages and song lyrics. (The most singable tune on this album, “Giving that Heaven Away,” celebrates a brief 1960s sexual encounter with a girl “one year over the age of consent.”)

Browne senses in sexual desire a longing for real transcendence (“Star of happiness, star of love/Lead us to the shore/That only women hold the promise of…”), but, unlike Dante’s longing for Beatrice, there’s no final shore on which to anchor, no ultimate center toward which his longing draws him.

As he considers what men will offer for the promise of sexual release, the line suddenly quotes a Negro spiritual: “Ohhhhh let my people go,” and it’s unclear whether the “people” seeking freedom here are sex workers or the men who seek them out. And when he contemplates an opportunity to “lead her to the palace my imagination rules,” he also realizes he’ll “fashion from her nakedness/The innocence that’s gone/Gone as the time she’s given the suffering of fools.”

Browne’s written better songs in his career than “Live Nude Cabaret,” but this one gets so many things right: thoughtful lyrics sung to an intriguing tune, an honest, questioning irony, and a sidelong route to truth. Along that winding road, the listener may make connections in his or her own life the songwriter scarcely imagined. I can’t imagine Jackson Browne minding that at all.