Ask him what he's reading, and he'll give you a list (Garbage Land by Elizabeth Royte, among many), after which, he'll deftly leap from a question about the Kindle (he has one, but prefers actual books) to how downloading music just isn't as much fun if you can't hold the album and read the liner notes. Follow that up with an esoteric account of the intangibles of songwriting, and the man who gave us "Lawyers in Love," "Somebody's Baby," "Take It Easy" (which was turned into a massive hit by his friends in The Eagles) and "Doctor My Eyes" then talks about current Internet meme "Friday" (by Rebecca Black), wondering at what we can read into it as an artifact of the now.
His upcoming cross-Canada tour has him completely alone with guitar, and a backlog of songs both deeply personal (e.g., "Song for Adam") and political ("World in Motion"), although none of it is set in stone. He appears to be revising as he goes along, enjoying rearranging and rediscovering songs he hasn't listened to in years.
"The focus for this tour is more on the songwriting, which is exhilarating for me," Browne says. "The joke was, my friends were saying, 'Oh, you're going out and doing a solo acoustic show. Who's playing with you?'
"Even I immediately thought of going out with (friend and longtime multi-instrumentalist side man) David Lindley, because it never occurred for me to do it alone, but the guy who thought of the idea said, 'That's what people want to hear: you.' It produces a heightened relief of the songwriting, because it puts the songs in high relief. You see how they're made, you see what's really in them. It's been very inspiring for me, because I get to hear them that way, as well; I get to hear them at their most potent."
Browne continued to chat with Postmedia News' Tom Murray.
Q: The other side of it is that you have to be on top of your guitar-playing; you don't have Lindley to hide behind.
A: Well, it's coming along. In an email I sent to a drummer friend of mine, I said, "Y'know, it's the last frontier, staying in tune and playing in time." Drummers have always been my big brothers, the guys who have been the most helpful, but also biting and intolerant of my timekeeping skills. Some of these songs I've written (are) in time signatures that, when I sing them, well, shall I say the time is a little more elastic? That's the euphemism I prefer.
Q: Until the last few decades, we had plenty of singer-songwriters who were notorious for having "elastic" time. How many blues men played extra beats or measures beyond the standard twelve bar?
A: Yeah, like Lightnin' Hopkins, who would sometimes do bars of six, or whatever. The way we've listened to music has morphed, because the tempos are perfectly uniform, or the pitch completely corrected.
Collectively, our ears have changed. There's a heightened standard and yet, at the same time, there's a lot of stuff that doesn't adhere at all to the standards of my generation. Like, what you say in a song, for instance. Listen, have you heard that song "Friday" on YouTube?
Q: By Rebecca Black? Yeah.
A: It's shocking when you find out that it's 12 million people, or whatever the number is, watching, and it's like uber-bubble gum. But that's always been going on. Kids have every right to sing about what matters to them. (Laughs) "Which seat will I take?" That's great. It's a very happy little song. The (fake) Dylan version actually starts getting to you: "front seat, back seat, which seat will I take?" and then, all of these YouTube comments saying, "I remember this was the pivotal song of the civil-rights movement." Front of the bus, back of the bus, which side am I on? (Browne laughs raucously.) When people listen to music, more than half of what's happening is happening in their heads. In that way, music is wonderful and mysterious, like an oracle or a Rorschach (test).
Canadian dates include: Victoria March 25, Vancouver March 26, Edmonton March 28, Calgary March 29, Saskatoon March 31, Winnipeg April 2, Toronto April 5, Montreal April 9, Halifax April 12, St. John's April 14, Ottawa April 17.
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