Sunday, August 28, 2016

Running on Empty : Jackson Browne

Writer: Browne
Producer: Browne
Released: Jan. '77, Asylum
17 weeks; No. 11
The Running on Empty album was Browne's grand experiment: a set of all-new songs recorded onstage, in hotel rooms and on the tour bus. The title track was actually written while Browne was driving to the studio each day to make The Pretender. "I was always driving around with no gas in the car," he said. "I just never bothered to fill up the tank because — how far was it anyway? Just a few blocks."
Appears on: Running on Empty (Elektra)

11 comments:

windbag said...

One of my favorite songs. And David Lindley on slide is masterful.

Chip Ahoy said...

DBQ answered at Gotye

Joe Biden, America's Putin said...

I'd have to think about where it would place on my favorite song list. #25?
I love the song.

Saw JB at Red Rocks in the late 1990's. One of the best shows ever. Timeless.

Lem the artificially intelligent said...

Thanks Chip.

Chip Ahoy said...

I think this funny. That sister of mine is something else. This is the nice sister I used to pretend being a hairdresser with a couple of times when I was six and she was like four.

Her family spends a lot of time with the church in Omaha. They're very active doing things throughout the week, not just attending services. It's a thing with them.

I wrote my nephew and said I hope they are treating him well on his birthday.

He wrote back today and said my sister told him to tell me they're treating him like shit.

Now you just don't expect that from the precious darling God-fearing family and that's why it's so hilarious. They know how to talk to me.

ndspinelli said...

Nice, family story Chip. I bet you're a good uncle.

chickelit said...

OK, keep that road song in mind when you revisit Take It Easy which was also written by Jackson Browne.

Lem the artificially intelligent said...

I knew there was a Running on Empty movie. But if I had to guess at what it was about I would have been way off.

Link

I was imagining a Thelma and Louise, with Thelma as a guy. A modern Bonnie and Clyde.

A Hysterical Blindness (2002) type saga.

Good lord was Uma Thurman good in that.

Chip Ahoy said...

I have 7 ways to sign "empty" and they all makes sense.

But this song is too old for the kids today to care about. So we have no way to compare using this song. But I know what the kids will do. I can see it in advance, and they are wrong. I would not be able to identify the song by the way they would express the key concept. I can see this. I can predict it with 100% accuracy.

Let's see.

Empty garden xxxxx nothing
Little empty boat xxxxx nothing
Empty Room xxxxxx nothing

Empty Chairs at Empty Tables ✓ (wrong concept, s/b empty as in abandoned)
Remember the Empty Grave ✓ (naked grave s/b nothing there)
Empty Me ✓ (naked me, s/b drain me)
Way Beyond Empty ✓ (naked inside, s/b beyond nothing)
Empty my Hands ✓ (naked my hands, s/b dump the contents)

What is so hard to conceptualize dumping your hands of content? Huh? Why be so g.d. literal and concrete about it? Aren't all these people around deaf people, or what? Come ON! Get with the program! But they do not. None do. Watching them is annoying as hell. And my impulse is slap them into awareness of conceptualizing first then expressing. But they do not. They take the text and find the English word that matches. They cannot snap out of English.

Let's see how the dude does it. A million dollars says he signs the concept of naked. "how long will I be haunted is shown, "how long will I be ghost." You owe me a million dollars. "naked my hands."

He does well. But still. They're all stuck in English and transliterating and cannot escape to parallel concepts then show it. They all would never make it in Egyptian hieroglyphs. They'd all have tremendous difficulty with any other language. All this shows what makes the CODA babes so excellent. They are free of English and switch to the place in their minds were another way of thinking and expressing exists. They have no such compartmented place to go.

I'm annoyed pursuing this effort.

Blank Spaces ✓ must skip to the 5th stanza for "blank"

Finally! Somebody who's fun. This kid is great. He too uses "naked" for blank, where "zero" or "nothing" is more appropriate. He's a rather ugly skinny little hipster teen with an unnecessary long scarf wrapping his pencil neck , but he's cute as hell to watch. He does very well throughout. Fun to see it.

The Tomb is Empty ✓ (naked again)
Another Empty Bottle ✓ (naked again. sign for bottle is wonderful. Some sign a cylindrical bottle while others show the shape starting at the base and grabbing the neck and you'd swear they're holding an invisible glass bottle. Empty for bottle is a specific signal like pulling the cork out into a fist and that means the bottle is empty. But they do not know that.)

Too bad. I've got several very good ways to convey the concept of empty depending on the thing that is empty, all these people I've studied just now have only 1. What a bummer! A gas tank hinted in the song is different from no energy left that the gas tank is a metaphor. Pick either one, and they're both different from naked kind of textbook empty. is different from empty of ideas, is different from a tomb is different from your hands being emptied, different from your arms being emptied, from a heart being empty, from ambition being empty, from morals being empty, and so on. And all these hearing people have one sign they learned from one book and no real experience whatsoever and it shows.

That does not make me cross, it makes me frustrated. There is nothing to learn here. Nothing.

Joe Biden, America's Putin said...

OT

The Burkini Isn’t About Faith; It’s About Control

Joe Biden, America's Putin said...

Tried to scroll thru some of the link. Rolling Stone doing their level best to defeat an dissuade people from Trump and Johnson. I didn't see any pro-Hillary, but the anti-stuff was all over. This is why we never win. All these pop culture magazines are in the tank for the D-corruption.