Mr Browne is Upside Down

So someone loaned me The Very Best Of Jackson Browne (2004), which I've been listening to in the car for the past couple of days.

First of all, let me say that I always quite liked the idea of Jackson Browne, but never quite got around to listening to his work. But half-heard songs off the radio from years ago are often disappointing when listened to properly, and so it proved with these CDs.

The other thing I want to say straight off, this being my hobby horse, is that both CDs are too long. As a single CD, too long, and as two CDs, too bloody much. Who are we kidding, Mr Browne? The Very Best of You would fit comfortably onto a single CD, would it not?

As it is, the two discs divide neatly into "the 70s" and "after the 70s." What's especially striking about this division is that everything sounds more or less okay up until the end of disc 1, and then (for the first half of disc 2 at least), it all sounds shite.

I've mentioned once or twice (!) that record production has been going down hill since around 1975, and the evidence is no clearer than on the second CD. Suddenly the vocal sounds awful, the guitars are harsh and horrible, crappy synthy sounds get in your face, and the drums are not only hideous, but seem to sit on top of everything else, like a school bully farting into the face of a Year 8 kid.

I blame MTV, I think. I bet there's something crappy going with the idea of "mixing for TV" or something. Or they just put bits into the song that would fit the bit of the video. "Tender is the Night," for example, which I half-heard years ago, turns out to be a bit crap, and there's stuff going on at the end, you can just see the video pictures.

Things improve a bit after that, but the damage is done. 1980 comes around and the producers manage to make Browne sound like Billy Joel, for god's sake, and surely nobody would want to sound like him?

I note from his web site that Jacko Browne has gone all indie and is releasing a load of "solo acoustic" tracks. Perhaps he's trying to redeem himself; I know if I were him I'd listen back to that 80s stuff and want to re-record it.