Palm Springs Life / Desert Guide / July 2010 / Jackson Browne Brings Love to the Desert

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Jackson Browne Brings Love to the Desert

The man who penned The Pretender, one of Rolling Stone’s all-time top 500 albums, is anything but. Singer-songwriter Jackson Browne, who performs at Agua Caliente Casino • Resort • Spa’s The Show on July 18, has written and performed some of the most erudite and poignant songs in popular music. His passion for the craft helped define a genre of songwriting fueled by raw honesty and emotion. And let’s not forget personal politics. As influential and enduring as his music is Browne’s legacy as an advocate for social and environmental justice. In 2008, he received the NARM Harry Chapin Humanitarian Award, and a year earlier, the World Hunger Year ASCAP Harry Chapin Humanitarian Award.

An inductee into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (2004) and the Songwriter’s Hall of Fame (2007), Browne’s list of hits is momentous, including “Running on Empty,” “Doctor My Eyes,” “Boulevard,” and “Somebody’s Baby,” from the soundtrack for the popular Fast Times at Ridgemont High.

Browne’s latest release, Love Is Strange, features longtime friend and musical co-conspirator David Lindley. The two-CD live album — on Browne’s label, Inside Recordings—offers highlights from a tour of Spain where they played everywhere from grand concert halls and rock venues to intimate clubs. In liner notes for Love Is Strange, Browne writes of the charmed tour it captures, “It was a flash, as we sometimes used to say in California. A flash in time that went by so effortlessly, and with such pleasure, that I must ask myself if it really happened. But here it is — a CD of some recorded moments, or perhaps a bridge, or a small door, between a life lived mostly in America and time spent with some really good friends in Spain.”

Browne’s impressive career sparked during the mid-60s in the folk clubs of Los Angeles and Orange counties. German born with American parents, his family returned to Los Angeles when Jackson was three. Except for a brief stint in NYC in the late 1960s — when he was an integral presence in the coffeehouse scene there — Browne has always called Southern California home.

Jackson Browne, his debut album, came out on David Geffen’s Asylum Records in 1972. Rolling Stone wrote in its original review that, “Jackson Browne’s sensibility is romantic in the best sense of the term: his songs are capable of generating a highly charged, compelling atmosphere throughout, and — just as important — of sustaining that pitch in the listener’s mind long after they’ve ended.”

If you’re a fan of concise, moving lyrics, and memorable melodies, you’ll want to catch Jackson Browne’s desert appearance at Agua Caliente Casino • Resort • Spa, 32250 Bob Hope Dr., Rancho Mirage. 888-999-1995