Jackson Browne's own name for his new double CD is 'just about the best of' - but then he's not into self-promotion, he tells Tony Clayton-Lea.
Who'd want to be a spokesperson for a generation? Not Jackson Browne, that's for sure. Over the years, various critics have written that Browne - born in Heidelberg, Germany, in 1948, and a Los Angeles resident from 1951 - was to the 1970s what Bob Dylan was to the 1960s: a songwriter whose finger was on the quickening pulse of social and political change - minus the tricky wordplay and some of the unforgettable tunes, perhaps. Browne, however, dismisses the very notion of such a spurious comparison.
"Every generation has their own developments, things they uncover," he begins, talking to The Irish Times from Barcelona, the first city stop in a European tour that sees him visit Ireland for two shows later this month.
"I don't really enjoy being compared to Dylan because he's still doing what he is doing; it's ongoing. The generation of the 1970s owes a great deal to Bob Dylan, but I don't accept the mantle of being any particular decade's Dylan; he's still with us and is stronger than ever. It' s inappropriate and a pretty hard thing to live up to.
"Besides, no-one will ever do for me what Bob Dylan did in the 1960s and continues to do. A particular thing opened up. There was literacy at play and a kind of consciousness expansion that had to do with the Civil Rights movement, the Vietnam War and people's personal empowerment - and Dylan changed the equation for all time. Perhaps in the 1990s it was Kurt Cobain - a valid comparison to make, I think - but you mustn't lose sight of the fact that Cobain grew up in a world that was already affected by what Dylan had done."
Browne occasionally talks in interrupted circles: he has the habit of starting a sentence and then trailing off, his mind too busy to jump on to a second train of thought rather than making the wheels screech to a halt. Yet for all his stop-start loquaciousness, he makes sense when he gets started on a topic or a theme. He bemoans, for example, the way in which popular culture holds literacy at arm's length, but he realises that meaning doesn't only reside in words.
"The main culture has gone more into things that are visual and fashion- oriented," he says. "It's not as if the great songwriters have completely gone away" - and here he mentions Shawn Colvin, Patti Griffin and Steve Earle - "but for those of us who love words it seems that less and less attention is given over to them."
Browne was a highly proficient pianist and guitarist by the mid-1960s; by the end of that decade he had travelled from Los Angeles to New York and back, in search of work and art, stumbling upon - or so it seems - a group of equally struggling singers and songwriters who, like himself, wanted to fuse folk and country with elements of rock music. By the early 1970s, Browne's cachet among his colleagues had been established through his songs being covered by the likes of Linda Ronstadt and The Byrds.
His eponymous 1971 début album, meanwhile, dragged him out of the singer/songwriter ghetto and into an arena where his in-vogue superstar status never appeared to conflict with his man-of-the-people persona.
"I've always felt it's perfectly natural for a person to recede into the passing generations," he says by way of explanation. "If you love what you do you continue to do it because of that. Maybe you are visited by fits of competition and ambition - I'm not very much. At the same time you console yourself with the passing of your day, your moment, the apex of your contribution. I hope to do more good work, and I want it to be judged in the context of my other work.
"Of course, what's happening in politics now is much more interesting than what is happening in art. Hopefully, art can help us understand the politics, can help us deal with it, but what is happening politically is momentous and in a way is more deserving of our attention."
He's always been interested in politics, and this is borne out not only by his fund-raising days during the 1970s and beyond but also by his apparent lack of ambition to be anything other than a songwriter.
"I grew up in the crucible of the 1960s, with the Civil Rights movement, the psychedelic drugs, experimenting with Eastern religion and sexual freedom," he says. "That has continued to go on for me and for everyone who started out at that point. Politics, also, has been ever-present, but I don't recall a time when it was more important to pay attention, or indeed when more people were paying attention. People are beginning to see that there's a great deal at stake."
When he isn't concerning himself with the politics of his country and, by extension, the world, Browne is content to play the self-promotion game - but only if the interviewer implicitly understands that the promotion is a by-product of the business and not the business itself. Which brings us out of the Bush/Kerry/Bin Laden equation and into the rather less fraught area of Browne's recently released double CD, The Very Best of Jackson Browne.
"Actually, I think it's more the 'just about the best of Jackson Browne'!" he says. "These songs have had a life beyond the recorded versions, so for me to revisit them - as I did in order to put this record together - was very interesting. The songs are pretty much representative of what I do. The record is chronological, but in a live setting I can cut backwards and forward in time, and that's more interesting to me."
Is it strange seeing the songs, and the episodes of his life lived therein, laid out as a track listing?
"They represent places I've been . . ." he starts and then, sure enough, trails off.
"For me, writing songs is a little bit like consulting an oracle. You're not sure what you want to say until you write the song; there are so many phrases that pop into your mind and you wonder what it might mean to other people. I'm not sure, however, that the songs mean the same to me as they do to other people. So much is created in the mind of the listener. The song is only half-finished as it leaves my hands because of what happens when people hear them."
Browne has been in the upper echelon of American singer/songwriters for nigh on 35 years - up there with the likes of Dylan and Springsteen and Canadians Joni Mitchell, Neil Young and Leonard Cohen - yet Browne isn't exactly a songwriting factory.
Like his contemporaries he measures out his time in singular, long and winding ways. Album releases are sporadic for a particular reason, he says.
"It gets harder and harder to write something you like. I don't want to repeat myself, but that is unavoidable. I sound like myself, and I concern myself with certain things in this life regardless of how much I grow and try not to repeat myself. Nonetheless, I think the effort is worthwhile to not just crank out the same thing over and over again."
It's more beneficial to know than to be known, he infers, pointing to the spurious notion of celebrity as an absolute negative, especially in the way it can become an impediment to talking to people and knowing what is going on.
"Certain anonymous places are tremendous," he says with a sigh that other famous people will recognise and echo. But "celebrityhood has become the coin of the realm".
"The record company presidents have become more important than their artists," he adds. "Similarly, the fashion and clothes designers, and how rock stars now aspire to having a clothing line. That's the level of how these deities have climbed several mountains higher than we have in the past. Yet songwriters such as Lucinda Williams and bands such as My Morning Jacket - they're the real thing. What they do is nothing about owning a private plane.
"It's all about what happens when you open your mouth to sing - how much can you communicate."
Browne mentions Van Morrison as an example of someone who is reluctantly in the public eye. Morrison is a celebrity, Browne posits, because he can't help but be,yet he doesn't aspire to be perceived in that way or willingly go along with all that celebrity status entails.
"It wouldn't be helpful to him to do that, and to me that trumps everything," Browne says.
"If you can make music you like, just sit down and play the guitar and sing, then surely that's the most important thing?"
Jackson Browne plays Dublin's Olympia Theatre on Friday, November 19th, and Belfast's Waterfront Hall on Sunday, November 21st. The Very Best of Jackson Browne is on release