Jackson Browne
Lawyers In Love
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Hard cases make bad law, lawyers like to say, and no rock & roll case is harder to pin down than Jackson Browne. For many listeners, Browne is the quintessential guilty pleasure, a navel-gazing singer/songwriter whose moony ruminations and hokey melodies ought to give anyone the giggles. But they don't. When Browne has all his talents in register, his work is almost appallingly moving. Lawyers in Love, Browne's seventh album, marks a significant change from the feckless hyperconfessionality of 1980's Hold Out ("Anyway, I guess you wouldn't know unless I told you ... but I love you!"), a welcome widening of perspective that allows Browne to escape, once and for all, the L.A. albatross
Read More that has hung around his neck for the last eleven years. Even though Lawyers in Love does send Browne into uncharted waters–where he occasionally sounds a bit lost–it nevertheless is a more nervy, intelligent LP than its predecessor. Browne's desire to pluck his head out of his navel is evident right from the title cut. "I can't keep up with what's been going down," he laments in the opening line, and the big surprise is not that he's out of touch, but that he cares about being in touch in the first place; for all of Browne's admirable work on behalf of the peace movement, his personal politics seem keyed toward some sort of postapocalyptic utopia ("Before the Deluge"). And in "Lawyers in Love," God's interplanetary travelers discover Americans "waiting for World War III," shoveling down fast food in front of the television. All told, it's an unusually whimsical lyric from a man not noted for his sense of humor. Instrumentally, "Lawyers in Love" is Browne's headiest track to date: a solid keyboard-and-guitar attack flavored by a chanting falsetto figure, a church-organ swell, sha-la-la backup vocals, even an old-fashioned modulation out of the middle eight. Hey, does this guy want a hit single or what? Plenty of people will choose to read the songs that follow "Lawyers in Love" as romans à clef about Browne's troubled marriage, but to these ears, it seems as if he's gone to some pains to broaden the scope of his art. "'Cause you survive/Don't mean you grow," he notes in "On the Day," and why couldn't that refer as much to the moribund California soft-rock claque as to a relationship? "Open your eyes," he implores. "Look out below." The impassioned "Cut It Away" does sound like it could have fallen off of For Everyman or Late for the Sky–minus, of course, its Linn-drum backíng. What hurts more, Browne seems to ask in this track, the person who lets you down or the thing inside you that makes you love him or her? His falsetto yelps of "I love you" at the song's end seem more an afterthought than a directed statement, a self-acknowledgement of inner feeling as opposed to the ostentatious declaration of "Hold On Hold Out." From there, Browne plunges into new environments and find
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