The song Jackson Browne hated until his therapist convinced him otherwise
At that tender age of 16, when most boys are experimenting with setting themselves on fire, Jackson Browne wrote ‘These Days’. It’s a love song that has the experiential sigh of a divorcee in their 50s, leading to my pet theory that it was actually the result of Browne’s father getting a bit carried away when helping his son out with his homework. But frivolous pet theories aside, it undoubtedly established the young songwriter as someone who dealt in profundity.
He carried this on throughout his career, charting break-ups with Joni Mitchell, political despair, and the suicide of his wife in some of the most stirring folk songs ever to be rendered suitable for AM radio. And therein lies the dichotomy of Browne’s appeal; he wrote with such sincerity that ‘hits’ and pop platitudes were the last thing on his mind, but his knack of pairing this sincerity with the sweetest melodies around made him a commercial hit.
So, in 1982, his friend Cameron Crowe figured that a partnership between Browne and Danny Kortchmar would provide the perfect music for his planned teen movie, Fast Times at Ridgemont High. Somewhat reluctantly, Browne agreed to do his buddy a favour, and he got to work with Kortchmar. Obviously, he entered the process a little differently, with a preordained teen story in mind. His discomfort with this was apparently notable from the onset. But Kortchmar had a hook and the chorus line, “She must be somebody’s baby,” so Browne stuck with the process out of loyalty to his buddies.
The problem was Browne always found it hard to divorce himself from his music. Here he was as a 34-year-old with a welter of rough life experiences writing about a teenager longing for a prom queen. So, he stressed over the lyrics. Even as they began to take form and the fact that ‘Somebody’s Baby’ sounded like an instant hit to everybody else, Browne himself could never settle into the way of thinking. In fact, he was just about ready to disown the song and apparently would’ve if it was for the ties to his friends.
He soldiered on but dismissed the finished product as meaningless “unabashed pop” and refused to find a place for it on his own forthcoming record. David Geffen thought he was nuts for giving up a track that surely promised him platinum status, but Browne couldn’t shake the fact that it irked the very last nerve in him to have produced something vapid and riddled with platitudes.
Alas, perhaps some platitudes are what they are because they hold a truism at their core that we can all relate to? After hating ‘Somebody’s Baby’ for as long as it existed and now picking over the regrets of his life in a therapy session following the tragedies that later unfurled in his life, his view on the track would suddenly change.
Perched on a couch in a state of ambivalence, he raised his distaste once more, but as Browne revealed on After the Deluge, his therapist was a little younger and had adored the smash hit. They told him: “You’ve got it all wrong. This is about something important. Everybody wants to belong to somebody. Everybody wants to feel loved and this is the most fundamental thing.”
Suddenly, the soppy sentimentalism of the track resonated way beyond a teen movie and tapped into the meaning of life that the likes of Jefferson Airplane had elucidated a few decades before him: “When the truth is found to be lies / And all the joy within you dies / Don’t you want somebody to love.”
