Schemes to Gain the Motherland

I recently bought Jackson Browne's SOLO ACOUSTIC, VOL. 1.

I'm in awe of it. And I don't know if it'll ever come out of the CD player in my car.

It's a live recording, and it feels so righteously intimate. It’s like he sits in my passenger seat every time I drive somewhere, serenading me with his smart lyrics and spellbinding musical phrases.

The CD showcases Jackson's songwriting and performing, as he shifts between his guitar and a piano -- engaging the audience in one long conversation for which he supplies the soundtrack.

Whether the gentle aural massage of "For Everyman," or the yearning infused throughout "Your Bright Baby Blues," I'm simultaneously captivated and disappointed. But, my disappointment is rooted only in my assumption that too many people younger than I have missed out on his formidable talents.

I'm reminded, though, of that inspiring and poetic induction speech Bruce Springsteen delivered, as he ushered Jackson into the Rock-n-Roll Hall of Fame.

Just because I think you ought to, read this excerpt:

In seventies, post-Vietnam America, there
was no album that captured the fall from
Eden, the long, slow afterburn of the sixties --
its heartbreak, its disappointments, its spent
possibilities -- better than Jackson's masterpiece,
LATE FOR THE SKY.

…Jackson was always the tempered voice of
Abel. Toiling in the vineyards, here to bear
the earthly burdens, confronting the impossibility
of love, here to do his father's work.

Now, I always thought that in our fall from Eden,
…our real earthly task was that an unbridgeable
gap, or a black hole was opened up in our ability
to truly love one another and so our job here on
earth, the way we regain our divinity, our
sacredness, and our general good-standing is by
reconstructing love and creating love out of the
broken pieces that we've been given.