“‘Daddy’s Tune’ is a song I’ve meant to write for years. Sometimes I’ll only have a chorus and know exactly what the song is about. Suffice to say that’s a feeling I had about my father for a long time. It’s something I wanted to say to him and I’m glad I did.”Jackson Browne (611)

“This is a very personal song. It’s about a moment when you realize that something has changed, it’s over, and you’re late for wherever you’re going to be next. I don’t think you know when you’re talking about your [own] life – like when I wrote ‘Jamaica Say You Will’ for my first album, the circumstances I conjured up were almost exactly about this relationship I’d just left, but I didn’t know it. It was only when I stood back that I realized it was actually about her. I think that’s the way mythology emerges, it springs from human experience, not from the conscious mind thinking, ‘I shall devise a cleverly veiled reference to my own experience’. I don’t think you have that choice. Humans make metaphors, that’s one way of telling the truth in an artful way.”Jackson Browne (609)

“This is about not being able to pay up, stealing someone else’s heart and not being able to go on with the theft – not knowing the complete cost, and wanting to call it a loan until you grow enough to pay for it. David Lindley had this lovely guitar melody, I wrote the words as an imaginary scenario, but again it reflects what was going on in my life – and Lindley thinks it’s about somebody in his life!”Jackson Browne (609)

“This asks: ‘Why should everybody go out and die because you want to define who our enemies are according to how you make your money?’ A lot of people who had never listened to my music before appreciated that somebody was bringing this up, because the United States was trying very hard to go to war in Latin America.”Jackson Browne (609)

“Probably my most personal, and sometimes I think my best, song. It’s about whether we know what’s going on at a particular time, whether we recognize people for who they really are, whether we know what people are talking about when we’re in a relationship with them. It’s about missed opportunities.”Jackson Browne (609)

“My first attempt to write a simpler, more impressionistic lyric about how your reasons for doing what you do change as you go along. It’s about what I was trying to find in the beginning, when I was starting to write songs, and what that search has become 25 years later. I like the image of the barricades, because it raises the question of who decides who gets in – whether we’re inside trying to keep people out, as so many are, or outside trying to get in.”Jackson Browne (609)

“The Chieftains asked me to be on their Christmas album. I said yes, then began to think about what I might sing about, wondering if I might get lumbered with having to sing about Mary, Joseph and a donkey. Then finally a Mayan indian friend said, ‘You’re a songwriter, write something of your own’ – so I wrote about the effect of Christianity on his people. In the end, it turns into a statement of allegiance to Christ but not to Christianity.”Jackson Browne (609)

“This song was inspired by a High Noon scenario – about someone having to question his allegiance to all his heroes, to do the right thing and live up to his personal ideals. It’s about hearing the inner voice that knows right and wrong.”Jackson Browne (609)