"The biggest influence? I've had several at different times - but the biggest for me was Bob Dylan, who was a guy that came along when I was twelve or thirteen and just changed all the rules about what it meant to write songs"
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A young musician hearing Bob Dylan at twelve or thirteen is not just discovering a new artist; he is watching the job description of songwriter being rewritten in real time. Jackson Browne evokes that moment when the radio stopped offering only tidy love songs and started delivering news bulletins from the interior life and the wider world. Dylan made it possible to treat lyrics as literature, to let songs carry politics, irony, prophecy, and street talk without losing the electricity of pop. The old rules of brevity, polish, and predictability gave way to sprawling narratives, jagged rhymes, and a voice that prized character over prettiness.
Saying he had several influences acknowledges how a creative life evolves through phases, yet naming Dylan as the biggest marks a hinge in cultural history. For a generation of writers, Dylan legitimized authorship. You could write your own material, be idiosyncratic, even contradictory, and audiences would follow. That permission granted by Dylan is visible in Brownes early achievement; he wrote These Days as a teenager, a song with a weary, nuanced self-awareness that would have seemed out of bounds in the Brill Building era. The Laurel Canyon movement that Browne helped define drew on this revised rulebook: introspective lyrics, long-form storytelling, and the blending of personal experience with social commentary.
Dylan also reconfigured form. He stretched song length, loosened meter, and let the melody serve the words rather than the reverse. Brownes catalog reflects that freedom, from the diary-like travelogue of Running on Empty to the civic urgency of Lives in the Balance. Even when Brownes tone is smoother and more tender than Dylans rasp and bite, the underlying idea is the same: the songwriter as keen observer, moral witness, and self-questioning narrator. The influence here is not mimicry but a widening of possibility. Once someone changes the rules, every song becomes a place to test them.
Saying he had several influences acknowledges how a creative life evolves through phases, yet naming Dylan as the biggest marks a hinge in cultural history. For a generation of writers, Dylan legitimized authorship. You could write your own material, be idiosyncratic, even contradictory, and audiences would follow. That permission granted by Dylan is visible in Brownes early achievement; he wrote These Days as a teenager, a song with a weary, nuanced self-awareness that would have seemed out of bounds in the Brill Building era. The Laurel Canyon movement that Browne helped define drew on this revised rulebook: introspective lyrics, long-form storytelling, and the blending of personal experience with social commentary.
Dylan also reconfigured form. He stretched song length, loosened meter, and let the melody serve the words rather than the reverse. Brownes catalog reflects that freedom, from the diary-like travelogue of Running on Empty to the civic urgency of Lives in the Balance. Even when Brownes tone is smoother and more tender than Dylans rasp and bite, the underlying idea is the same: the songwriter as keen observer, moral witness, and self-questioning narrator. The influence here is not mimicry but a widening of possibility. Once someone changes the rules, every song becomes a place to test them.
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| Topic | Music |
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