Late for the Sky

1	Late for the Sky 5:36
2	Fountain of Sorrow 6:42
3	Farther On 5:17
4	The Late Show 5:09
5	The Road and the Sky 3:04
6	For a Dancer 4:42
7	Walking Slow 3:50
8	Before the Deluge 6:18

Barnes & Noble

After two austere albums that established him as a fine writer and a brooding presence, Jackson Browne was in an enviable position for an early '70s singer-songwriter: He was sensitive, sexy, and southern Californian; poised on the verge of mainstream recognition; and in the throes of romantic crisis. This powerful combination, manifested as an album of pop know-how and soul-baring truths, made him a star. A poignant slice of Browne's glamorous and sometimes troubled life, LATE FOR THE SKY details a crumbling relationship heartache by heartache and tackles some really big issues: love, marriage, death, even the end of the world. But the album is more exhilarating than ponderous, thanks to gently rocking arrangements that never overpower Browne's modest but expressive vocals, crisp coproduction from Al Schmitt, and David Lindley's lead guitar and slide playing -- so distinctive it functions as a second voice that echoes Browne's every emotional twist. The album culminates in "Before the Deluge," an elegiac epic that, in retrospect, seems to mourn the end of innocence and youth for Browne's charmed circle as much as environmental gloom and doom. Michael Hill

All Music Guide

On his third album, Jackson Browne returned to the themes of his debut record (love, loss, identity, apocalypse) and, amazingly, delved even deeper into them. "For a Dancer," a meditation on death like the first album's "Song for Adam," is a more eloquent eulogy; "Farther On" extends the "moving on" point of "Looking Into You"; "Before the Deluge" is a glimpse beyond the apocalypse evoked on "My Opening Farewell" and the second album's "For Everyman." If Browne had seemed to question everything in his first records, here he even questioned himself. "For me some words come easy, but I know that they don't mean that much," he sang on the opening track, "Late for the Sky," and added in "Farther On," "I'm not sure what I'm trying to say." Yet his seeming uncertainty and self-doubt reflected the size and complexity of the problems he was addressing in these songs, and few had ever explored such territory, much less mapped it so well. "The Late Show," the album's thematic center, doubted but ultimately affirmed the nature of relationships, while by the end, "After the Deluge," if "only a few survived," the human race continued nonetheless. It was a lot to put into a pop music album, but Browne stretched the limits of what could be found in what he called "the beauty in songs," just as Bob Dylan had a decade before. William Ruhlmann