![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() By the mid-80s, there were substantially fewer takers for Browne’s angry and accusatory Lives in the Balance than for the less specific, well-things-have-certainly-changed wistfulness of his old pal Don Henley’s Building the Perfect Beast – though some of them returned when he dialled down the politics on 1993’s I’m Alive. When the yuppie era duly arrived, he didn’t necessarily grow with his audience – a significant portion of them deserted him, presumably turned off by his increasingly strident leftwing tone. He was the most artful of the 1970s west coast songwriters, who didn’t just spill his guts in confessional style but chronicled the boomer generation’s uncertain and increasingly disillusioned path through a landscape in which hippy idealism had withered: “Caught between the longing for love and the struggle for legal tender,” as he put it on 1976’s The Pretender, a song that fairly accurately presaged the dawning of the yuppie era. Browne’s reputation has helped keep him aloft. ![]()
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