Wealth & Money Quote by Jackson Browne

Browne isn’t humblebragging so much as quietly naming a historical glitch in the music business: he arrived at the moment when the old gatekeepers still mattered, but a savvy artist could slip a hand onto the lever. The line’s charm comes from its plainspoken candor. He doesn’t romanticize “the art”; he talks about infrastructure. A “great time to be born” is a sly way of admitting that timing, not purity, often decides who gets paid.

The specific intent is corrective. Browne’s generation is often framed as gifted singer-songwriters who simply rode talent into the spotlight. He’s reminding you that business arrangements made the difference between being celebrated and being solvent. “My own publishing company” signals control of the asset that actually compounds: songwriting rights. In a world of radio hits and cover versions, publishing is the quiet annuity, the thing that keeps earning when touring slows.

The subtext is a critique of the romantic mythology that artists succeed on merit alone. He’s pointing to structural advantage, and the comparison to “ten or fifteen years before” isn’t accidental. Earlier musicians were routinely locked into deals that treated songs like disposable product and artists like replaceable labor. Browne is marking a shift toward self-protection and leverage: incorporation as survival tactic, not sellout move.

Contextually, it’s also a snapshot of a pre-streaming window when owning rights could still reliably translate into “more money.” Today, that sentence reads almost like a dispatch from a disappearing era - when a songwriter could build a small empire simply by understanding what they owned.