Parenting & Family Quote by Jackson Browne

Taste, in Jackson Browne's telling, isn’t a lightning bolt; it’s a skill you grow into. He frames “really started liking music” not as passive fandom but as a threshold you cross when your hands can translate feeling into sound. That’s the quiet flex here: the moment you can play “some of it yourself,” music stops being background noise and becomes a language you can speak. Listening turns from consumption into participation, and that changes everything you hear.

The pivot to folk music matters. Folk is often sold as authenticity, but Browne implies something more practical: it’s an entry point. A few chords, a story, a communal tradition. You learn the mechanics - rhythm, phrasing, how songs are built - and suddenly the pop “hits” you once dismissed (or simply absorbed unthinkingly) reveal their engineering. “Rediscovered” is the key word. He’s not confessing a guilty pleasure; he’s describing a recalibration of attention. Pop becomes legible once you’ve wrestled with structure yourself.

There’s also a generational subtext: radio hits as childhood wallpaper, then later as artifacts with emotional charge. Browne came of age when the line between folk earnestness and radio accessibility was collapsing into singer-songwriter culture. His anecdote sketches that cultural moment from the inside: craft leading you back to mass culture, not away from it. The intent feels almost democratic - a reminder that the shortest path to “good taste” might be learning how songs actually work.