Note: This is the debut installment in an occasional series on a single song composed by a major American songwriter.
Rolling Stone magazine has canonized Late for the Sky as one of its "500 Greatest Albums of All Time." The magazine's initial review pronounced the album, with its themes of loss and rebirth, "lyric genius" and likened it to an autobiography. Its author, Jackson Browne, was 25 when the record was released in 1974.
He is now 67, traveling the world, still making music. He will perform Saturday night at WinStar World Casino and Resort, 60 miles north of Lewisville on Interstate 35.
He will undoubtedly play songs from Late for the Sky, whose eight entries flow seamlessly, one into the next, en route to a unifying theme. But it's the first song, the title track, that sets the tone, the gravitas, with Browne's piano and the guitar play of the incomparable David Lindley striking the initial, memorable notes.
It is a song so powerful and so moving about a relationship gone wrong that director Martin Scorsese used it in a pivotal scene in his 1976 movie, Taxi Driver. The title character, Travis Bickle, played by Robert De Niro in an Oscar-nominated performance, stares forlornly at a black-and-white television as teenagers slow-dance to "Late for the Sky" on Dick Clark's American Bandstand. The look on his face, coupled with the lyrics and the searing melody, suggest loneliness and alienation more gut-wrenchingly than anything could.
In recalling the song's earliest moments, Browne says: "I remember it very well. I remember writing the lines, 'Now, for me, some words come easy, but I know that they don't mean that much, compared with the things that are said when lovers touch.' That kind of broke me down right there, and it's very emotional."
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He loves the 2014 recording, Looking Into You: A Tribute to Jackson Browne, released by Music Road Records, which is co-owned by Dallas energy executive Kelcy Warren and Austin roots rocker Jimmy LaFave. Browne said one of his favorites was Joan Osborne's cover of "Late for the Sky."
"Yeah, that's the one," Browne says. "I love that. When I heard that, I felt that same very deep emotion that I felt when I wrote it, like the first night when I was writing it. She did a great job and kind of returned that song to me, in a way that rarely happens."
Going back even further, Browne says the first glimmer of the song came to him after he made a casual remark to a woman he was seeing at the time. Racing out the door to catch a flight, he blurted out: "I'm late. Late for the sky."
As often happens with creative people, the mention of an unexpected phrase inspired a title. That led to a song, which led to an album, which led to a signature moment in a career that saw Browne inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2004 and the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2007.
He began working on the title track in the hills above Los Angeles in Laurel Canyon, where he and so many of his colleagues launched their careers. He continued working on it at the Abbey San Encinco, the house his grandfather built in the early 20th century.
Evoking the look of a California mission, the abbey is used often these days as a period movie set. Browne calls it a magical place, and why not? It's where he finished the song and wrote the remainder of Late for the Sky.
Mike Rhyner, co-host of The Hard Line on "The Ticket" KTCK-FM (96.7) and AM (1310), is not alone in saying that the title song and the seven cuts that follow have gotten him through more tough times than any person he's ever known. "I hear that quite a bit," Browne says with a laugh. "I have come to know that the way it works for me is the way it works for other people."
" I remember writing the lines, 'Now, for me, some words come easy, but I know that they don't mean that much, compared with the things that are said when lovers touch.' That kind of broke me down right there, and it's very emotional."
This is Jackson Browne as he appeared in a video produced by National Public Radio:
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