Any good songwriter can only sing about what’s in their heart. There are a lot of problems that might come and go throughout their lives that cause them to go into writer’s block, but if there’s as long as they have that organ beating in their chest, they will be able to quote what it is saying to them to legions of listeners all around the world. And nothing does a songwriter good quite like a breakup, and Bruce Springsteen admitted seeing a master at work when he first heard Jackson Browne sing.
Because, for all of the power that ‘The Boss’ pulls out of the E Street Band, he admitted that he always went back to singer-songwriters. The power behind Clarence Clemons’s saxophone or Max Weinberg’s drums was one thing, but when listening to James Taylor or Carole King, they could get that same type of emotion across just through their knowledge of a good hook and finding just the right line to resonate with the listener.
And it’s not like Browne was making the equivalent of Beatles-level harmonies or anything. He still had a fantastic knack for melody, but he was every bit as knowledgeable about what people wanted out of relationships. This wasn’t about kid’s stuff anymore. It was about trying to find an emotional connection with someone that went beyond just notes on a page to the point where he seemed to be giving listeners advice that they didn’t realise they needed to know.
And even when Browne wasn’t at his best, he could still convey emotion better than anyone else. He may have had to give away songs like ‘Take It Easy’ to the Eagles after the fact, but hearing him sing about heartache on ‘The Pretender’ is all the more pressing, knowing that it was coming from a real experience.
Listening back to albums like Late for the Sky, there’s no doubt that this guy has been through the same kind of heartache that he talks about in his songs. All of these old flames are probably real and are walking the earth today, but Browne isn’t trying to tear his exes through the mud. He just wanted to understand love on that level, and even if it didn’t last, he still walked out of it as a stronger person.
For Springsteen, travelling to California and hearing Browne sing these kinds of songs was a masterclass in writing for him, saying at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, “It’s true that Jackson wrote some of the most beautiful break-your-heart music of all. I think what drew women to Jackson was that they finally felt they were listening to a guy who knew as much about love as they did. And when men listened to Jackson, they found out they knew more about love than they thought.”
That didn’t mean that every fan’s heart was safe, and Springsteen learned about his problems all too well when going through the fallout of his first marriage. With the help of Browne’s approach to songwriting, though, Tunnel of Love became one of the most nakedly honest albums that Springsteen ever made, never going into too much detail but always keeping the listener along for the ride through his heartache.
But isn’t that really what good music is all about? Not all of it is meant to be pretty all the time, and sometimes, within the most depressive songs ever made, there are hints of beauty lingering just underneath the surface.