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But with this song, he found a way to illustrate it, to show without telling. Plenty of people have done that, including Jackson Browne. It would be one thing to write a song that simply said that in the lyrics. Yes, the song says, the life of a touring musician – often boring when it’s not bacchanalian, and harmful to the soul when it is – takes a great deal from you, but it’s a price worth paying to get to play for people for an hour or two a night. That cross-fade from motel room to concert hall may have been a relatively simple matter for audio engineer Greg Ladanyi (the album’s unsung hero), but the emotional effect of it, the dramatic change it causes to the song’s meaning, is huge. It’s done so subtly that the first time you hear it, you probably won’t realise what’s happening until it’s happened. But then, after the second chorus, as the major 7th chord fades, the crickets are replaced by cheers from an audience, and we crossfade into a live-in-concert performance of the song. It’s a cover of a song by Danny O’Keefe, but Browne sings it as if it is his own, inhabiting every note convincingly. The song is a meditation on the cost of a life spent always on the move, losing contact with people you care about, taking drugs you oughtn’t to, and making only superficial connections with the people you meet. “It’s just another town along the road,” Browne concludes over a descending sequence that takes us back to G major and the start of the next verse. The verses rest upon the tension created by moving back and forth between G major and a G augmented, a tension that isn’t fully released until just before the end of the chorus, where a chord is held and the singer pauses long enough for us to hear the night-time sounds of crickets through an open window. The liner notes tell us it was tracked in Room 301 of the Cross Keys Inn, Columbia, MD *.

Browne sings the song quietly, accompanied by his own acoustic guitar and David Lindley’s smoky fiddle. The Road, the second track, initially sounds like a moment of pensive, quiet introspection after the adrenaline-fuelled high of the opening title track. Some of the tracks were recorded live in concert others were cut backstage, in hotel rooms and even on the tour bus itself (a Continental Silver Eagle, since you ask).

It functions as a thesis statement for the record, differentiating it from and simultaneously elevating it above any similar album in the rock ‘n’ roll canon.Įssentially a concept piece about a life spent touring, with new songs by Browne augmented by a number of co-writes and covers, Running on Empty was recorded on the road, outside the traditional studio environment.

There’s a moment early in Jackson Browne’s 1977 album Running on Empty that isn’t merely an impressive production coup, although it is that.

Jackson browne load out stay piano chords