‘Badge and Gun’ is the penultimate track on John Mayer’s sixth studio album, 2013’s Paradise Valley.
This album was recorded after Mayer underwent multiple surgeries to address a granuloma on his vocal cords. A year earlier, he had resigned himself to performing as a session musician on other artist’s recordings — a role that, with his guitar skills, he could have performed admirably.
I stopped finding Kanye West interesting about ten years ago. Even then, it was his music, not his persona, I found worthy of my time. Now, it’s neither.
But 2010’s My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy is a deserved classic. And the quartet of albums that preceded it are all good to great. That includes 2007’s Graduation, on which today’s random weekend selection appears.
Well, that went fast. Three weeks to explore the nearly 50-year career of Jackson Browne, a great 70s singer-songwriter who managed to stay relevant and interesting well into the new millennium.
Unlike my last deep dive subject, Browne’s friend and collaborator Joni Mitchell, his music did not fall off a cliff in the 80s. While I struggled with a couple of Browne’s albums due to their didactic political lyrics, the music was almost always spot on. He expertly evolved his sound without losing the earnest romanticism that made his work special out of the gate.
Continuing his pattern of waiting six years between albums, Jackson Browne released his most recent full-length effort, Standing in the Breach, in 2014. At 72, it’s unclear if this will be his last album, though he did release a song for Earth Day last year and has a couple of other small projects under his belt in the past few years.
If Standing in the Breach does prove to be his swan song, it’s a good and fitting one. The album finds Browne in a contemplative, nostalgic mood, and the easy, laid back sound is fitting for a record on which the best songs are about peaceful acceptance.
Jackson Browne waited six years to release his next album, 2008’s Time the Conqueror. Perhaps that wasn’t long enough.
I’m sorry to report that this record is the first in Browne’s catalog that did nothing for me from start to finish. The songs are too long and they lack memorable hooks. Every album I’ve heard so far has served up at least one track I consider a keeper, but not this one.
Meet Me In Montauk 