Jackson Browne wants to know what went wrong. Like several other platinum American rockers who came of age in the late Sixties – Bruce Springsteen, John Cougar Mellencamp and Don Henley are all his contemporaries – he's seen the heady activism of an era wither and die. On his eighth LP, Browne joins them in attempting to channel his disillusionment toward finding some order in today's chaos. He opens Lives in the Balance with "For America," both a prayer and a love song, which damns "a generation's blank stare." He doesn't find any answers – the LP closes with the bleak, disembodied chant "Time running out/Time running out."
his material of the world around him: much of his Seventies work found him drowning in a fountain of sorrow and self-pity. When Browne sings in "For America" of how he used to retreat into "the safety of my own head," he isn't kidding. There were exceptions, of course: the best tracks on
The Pretender in 1976 and
Running on Empty in 1978 showcased bracing smarts and a substantial lyric talent that counteracted Browne's guilty-by-reason-of-geography Southern California solipsism.
Lawyers in Love (1983) was transitional, juxtaposing such trademark dives into self-concern as "Tender Is the Night" with the more open, celebratory "For a Rocker" and the pithy title track, as probing (and hysterical) a dissection of cold-war politics in the Reagan era as the mainstream will allow.
Brown spent much of the last two years putting his own life in order, but he also took an active interest in the world outside his Los Angeles home, visiting Nicaragua and covering an overtly political song like Little Steven Van Zandt's "I Am a Patriot (and the River Opens for the Righteous)" at benefit shows. He became a vocal and visible patron of Nicaraguan bands and immersed himself in the values they champion. As a result, Latin America (and the U.S. government's meddling therein) dominates Lives in the Balance both lyrically and musically. Five of the album's eight songs allude to the violence south of our border; on the title track Browne employs members of the anti-contra Sangre Machehual, an L.A. Nueva Canción group.
For Browne, our crimes in Central America are the clearest example of the wrongheadedness of U.S. foreign policy. "Who are the ones that we call our friends?" Browne asks on the scathingly trenchant "Lives in the Balance" and sadly answers himself: "Governments killing their own." On the bitter "Soldier of Plenty," he focuses his rage on a single military figure; when his lyrics are more direct and less grand, as on this song, the issues seem more pressing.
This new-found ability to link the personal to the political breathes life into these songs and prevents them from becoming too didactic. On the horrifying "Lawless Avenues" (a virtual duet with sometime collaborator Jorge Calderon), the dead protago
