Or at least not much: there’s a definite whiff of ham-fisted hectoring about Until Justice Is Real, but The Dreamers’ story of an illegal immigrant focusses on the small human details and is more moving and powerful for it. The causes he supported were just, and you never doubted his sincerity, but you did occasionally wonder how much good lecturing people would do. Perhaps haunted by the thought that not everyone who bought his 70s albums agreed with him about the Reagan era (“Among the human beings in their designer jeans, am I the only one who hears the screams?” he pondered on 1983’s Lawyers in Love) he developed a tendency to lyrically beat people over the head. And Browne has had plenty of practice at what used to be called “message songs” – including practice at getting them wrong.
The title track feels like a distant relation of 1974’s Before the Deluge, which also viewed nature as a terrifying, ultimately ungovernable force. “The years I’ve seen that fell between my date of birth and yours / fade beyond the altered shore of a river changing course,” he sings on Minutes to Downtown. Nevertheless, decades later, there is a sense in which Browne still embodies the classic boomer singer-songwriter, at least insofar as he spends a lot of Downhill from Everywhere doing precisely the kinds of things that septuagenarian songwriters of a certain cast tend to do, including worrying about the environment, wondering aloud about the younger generation, dabbling in global music (there’s a Caribbean lilt to Love Is Love and a distinct Latin-American flavour to the rhythms of closer A Song for Barcelona) and writing love songs to a new partner who is evidently considerably younger than he is. By the mid-80s, there were substantially fewer takers for Browne’s angry and accusatory Lives in the Balance than for the less specific, well-things-have-certainly-changed wistfulness of his old pal Don Henley’s Building the Perfect Beast – though some of them returned when he dialled down the politics on 1993’s I’m Alive. When the yuppie era duly arrived, he didn’t necessarily grow with his audience – a significant portion of them deserted him, presumably turned off by his increasingly strident leftwing tone. He was the most artful of the 1970s west coast songwriters, who didn’t just spill his guts in confessional style but chronicled the boomer generation’s uncertain and increasingly disillusioned path through a landscape in which hippy idealism had withered: “Caught between the longing for love and the struggle for legal tender,” as he put it on 1976’s The Pretender, a song that fairly accurately presaged the dawning of the yuppie era. Browne’s reputation has helped keep him aloft.
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