Saturday, July 11, 2020

Song Lyric of the Day (Jackson Browne, on the Need to Make ‘A Joyful Sound’)


“Don't let the uncertainty turn you around
(The world keeps turning around and around)
Go on and make a joyful sound.”—American singer-songwriter Jackson Browne, “For a Dancer,” from his Late for the Sky LP (1974)

For me—and, I suspect, many other late-stage Baby Boomers—“For a Dancer” helped shape my musical tastes. Astonishingly, Jackson Browne wrote this meditation on mortality—a rare topic in the early years of rock ‘n’ roll—while still only in his mid-twenties.

But Browne became an adult in the convulsive 1960s, a period of protest and wide-ranging defiance that did not fade until Richard Nixon’s removal from office—an event still by no means certain when this singer-songwriter recorded Late for the Sky.

In considering the meaning of an individual life, then, Browne could not help but set it against a larger social framework. But even that more concrete, earth-bound perspective was rife with ambivalence: “Perhaps a better world is drawing near/Just as easily, it could all disappear,” he sang plaintively.

What to do, then? Don’t be paralyzed by lack of faith into inaction or failing to live in the moment, he advised: “Go on and make a joyful sound.”

Browne’s lyric resonated even more powerfully recently when I was listening to his 2005 Solo Acoustic Vol. 1 CD than it had when I first heard it as a teen. I am in the midst of a career transition, at a point when COVID-19 renders this—and even life itself—as uncertain as I’ve ever known it.

Browne’s lyric reminded me that I could, like W.H. Auden in his poem on the world on the brink of WWII, “September 1, 1939,” “Show an affirming flame.” One’s beliefs and actions matter to others, even when there may be no immediate evidence of it:

And somewhere between the time you arrive
And the time you go
May lie a reason you were alive
That you'll never know.

(The attached photo of Jackson Browne in concert was taken in March 2008 by Craig O’Neal.)

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