Songs of an Open Heart

“It works to a song’s disadvantage if it’s too explicit,” says Jackson Browne. “A song is like an instrument, like a guitar. Once it is built, it can be played by anyone.” The music on Browne’s new album, I’m Alive (Elektra), is so extraordinarily bare-hearted and openhanded, his lyrics so steady in their power, that the songs transcend the personal, working themselves into the listener’s memory.

The album is one of the best and fiercest of a long career that began with the ascendancy of California rock in the ’70s. Browne’s fragile, insinuating voice, the wistful assurance and blue-midnight resonance of his lyrics still speak the deepest secrets of the heart.

All his music shares an intensity and an intimacy with the listener: it is an acute, astute cauterization of the wounds of the spirit. I’m Alive is a duel between edgy resignation, of loving and hurtful recollection, and a cautionary wisdom that comes fresh from a skirmish on the front lines. You can almost feel the powder burn when in My Problem Is You Browne sings, “I wanted to live in the realm of the senses/ You’ve got to know how/ And for some kinds of pleasure there are no defenses/ I know that now.”

The songs have the sting of oblique autobiography. This has been his way since his first album in 1971: his 10 albums form a linear chronicle of the heart’s glories and ravages. Until now Browne, 45, has remained a discreet diarist: specific about emotions, silent about names. But this time he has been undermined by the headlines. Browne has been reasonably forthright about his messy breakup with actress Daryl Hannah, which resulted in lurid stories of battery, which Browne denied.

But he has not denied that his new songs were at least in part inspired by the relationship. Looking for personal clues in Browne’s songs is no more useful than trying to map the depth of Scott Fitzgerald by counting the bottles it took to finish Tender Is the Night. But it may be no coincidence that one of Browne’s songs got its title from that book. For both novelist and songwriter share a knowledge of the constraints of the spirit and the strain of love gone wild and wrong. Hurt may heal, but as Browne sings in All Good Things, even “the pleasure will mend.” He knows the deepest wounds leave no visible scars.