Jackson Browne: Easy Rider.

Jackson Browne

Jackson Browne plays the Lyric Theatre on February 12 and 14.

Jackson Browne has just released a superb new album The Naked Ride Home and is about to tour Australia. He is still here and about to take you by surprise.

Jackson Browne remains one of the music industry's most complex and fascinating figures. Browne has long been regarded as one of the most important artists to come out of Southern California. Over the course of three decades, he has written and performed some of the most literate and moving songs in popular music. His classic albums Late For The Sky, The Pretender, Running On Empty and For Everyman and with songs like Doctor My Eyes and Lives In The Balance, he has defined a genre of song writing that is charged with honesty, emotion and personal politics. Along the way, he has sold over 15 million albums and touched the hearts and minds of countless fans worldwide.

The Naked Ride Home is Browne's 13th album, and his first album of all new songs since the 1996 release, Looking East. At once poetic and elegant, whimsical and heart-rending, spiritual and sad, the music on The Naked Ride Home catalogues the human condition. It's a lament into the heart and an examination of all that is wrong with the American dream. With the skill of surgeon, Browne dissects the optimism and fatalism of his romantic West.

The Naked Ride Home stands as the most eclectic album of Browne's 30-year career. Showing the confidence and poise of an artist who has outlasted the trends and continually beaten the odds, Browne handles everything that comes his way on this new album with finesse and ease. It is an outstanding accomplishment. Browne is an artist that clearly 'walks around inside the questions of his day' and is trying through his honesty and articulate manner to 'clear the mess away' and detail the world-weariness we all feel in our relationships and with life with disarming compassion.

"I feel like an alien sometimes. You know, not in step with everyone else. I look at things from the outside. I love to tell stories in metaphors and by example. I want my music to be thought provoking and engaging," says Browne.

Nothing could be truer with the ten new songs on his new album that simply describe the world that he sees around him.

"I want people to think in the long term, to think in depth".

And, this new album is wonderfully empathetic to the human condition, even if it illuminates the dark corners of the human heart. Browne wants the listener to realize that it is possible to "rescue truth from beauty and meaning from belief."

Browne is a musician who appreciates his music and the live performance experience. He is looking forward to bringing his band to perform here in Australia.

"It's been a while since we have all performed in Australia together. We have been together as a group for ten years now and it is exciting to see that evolution in our playing style. We are really looking forward to connecting with our fans and audiences again," says Jackson. "Playing live music is a wonderful form of expressing ideas, progressive ideas and really getting people to think about human nature."

Browne is highly respected among his peers in the music field for both his musical gifts and his integrity, but he will not pander to our expectations. This is an artist who truly charts his own direction, and he has managed to succeed on his own terms for more than thirty years. This has won him accolades like the Steinbeck Award for embracing values of social and environmental justice in his work and this has won him the loyalty of fans worldwide. He is a true believer and for those who still think that music is the voice of the soul, then Jackson Browne will take you to that special place were music touches something inside your mind and while there he will ask the hard questions about love, hope, redemption and salvation from our own blindness and greed. Jackson Browne makes music that presents us choices and a hope for the future.