Personnel: Jackson Browne (vocals, acoustic guitar, slide guitar, piano); David Lindley (electric guitar, slide guitar, fiddle); Jai Winding (piano, organ); Doug Haywood (bass, background vocals); Larry Zack (drums, percussion); Henry Thome, H. Driver, Michael Condello (hand claps); Joyce Everson, Beth Fitchet, Terry Reid, Perry Lindley, Dan Fogelberg, Don Henley, J.D. Souther (background vocals).

Engineers include: Al Schmitt, Fritz Richmond, Kent Nebergall.

Digitally remastered by Steve Hoffman (May 1993, Steve's Retro-Mobile).

Personnel: Jackson Browne (vocals, acoustic guitar, slide guitar, piano); David Lindley (electric guitar); Jai Winding (piano, organ); Doug Haywood (bass instrument, background vocals); Larry Zack (drums, percussion); Don Henley, J.D. Souther, Dan Fogelberg (background vocals).

On his third album, Jackson Browne returned to the themes of his debut record (love, loss, identity, apocalypse) and, amazingly, delved even deeper into them. "For a Dancer," a meditation on death like the first album's "Song for Adam," is a more eloquent eulogy; "Farther On" extends the "moving on" point of "Looking Into You"; "Before the Deluge" is a glimpse beyond the apocalypse evoked on "My Opening Farewell" and the second album's "For Everyman." If Browne had seemed to question everything in his first records, here he even questioned himself. "For me some words come easy, but I know that they don't mean that much," he sang on the opening track, "Late for the Sky," and added in "Farther On," "I'm not sure what I'm trying to say." Yet his seeming uncertainty and self-doubt reflected the size and complexity of the problems he was addressing in these songs, and few had ever explored such territory, much less mapped it so well. "The Late Show," the album's thematic center, doubted but ultimately affirmed the nature of relationships, while by the end, "After the Deluge," if "only a few survived," the human race continued nonetheless. It was a lot to put into a pop music album, but Browne stretched the limits of what could be found in what he called "the beauty in songs," just as Bob Dylan had a decade before. ~ William Ruhlmann

Jackson Browne's early career was inextricably linked to the singer-songwriter movement of the 70s, and LATE FOR THE SKY has proven to be one of the era's strongest and most enduring releases. Browne's reflective songwriting style attained a new level of maturity on songs such as "Fountain Of Sorrow" and "For A Dancer," the latter a strikingly literate meditation on death.

The high points on LATE FOR THE SKY are the title track and "Before the Deluge," two brooding songs of personal and social apocalypse that bookend the album and seem to reflect the disillusionment and weather-beaten mood of the counter-cultural generation in the early '70s. The balance between Browne's gentle, emotive voice and the tasteful arrangements perfectly matches the incisive quality of the songwriting, making LATE FOR THE SKY one of Browne's strongest, and most consistent albums.