![]() Flavorwire’s “20 Dad-Rock Albums You Should Learn to Love” describes it as “music played by dads.” Another article last year reverts to a similar circularity: “What is dad rock? Picture your dad, in the car driving somewhere, loudly singing along to something and banging his hand on the steering wheel for extra emphasis. This is because the genre isn’t about specific musical conventions: it’s really about what kind of person the listener is. The term continues to be popular chiefly because it’s so malleable everything from Jackson Browne to Billy Joel to Pearl Jam to The National has found a spot under the dad rock umbrella. “Dad rock,” as a genre designation, has been around since the mid-’90s. As the intro to “Running on Empty” builds, or as Browne moves into his live cover of Maurice Williams and the Zodiacs’s “Stay,” the response arrives automatically, almost always with a little scorn: “This sounds like something my dad would listen to.” ![]() Usually, if I put on Jackson Browne when people are over, the conversation doesn’t drift to dysfunction or feminist cool or archness or chaos it turns to dads. Warren Zevon’s continued appeal resides in his hard living and baroque archness - the way his songs, even at their most desperate, face chaos with dark laughter. Didion, Nicks, and Ronstadt embody a resonant feminist cool. The allure of mid-’70s Fleetwood Mac stems partly from the band’s dysfunction and tumult. But while it’s easy to find young people willing to voice their love for Tusk or Excitable Boy, it’s harder to find similar levels of nostalgic revivalism for The Pretender or Lives in the Balance.I wonder how many people under 50 even know about Looking Into You: A Tribute to Jackson Browne,a double album of covers that came out quietly in April the fact that USA Today was streaming it hints perhaps at the record’s intended demographic. Through the ’70s and ’80s Jackson Browne was in Los Angeles with all these artists, collaborating with many of them. By now, ’70s Los Angeles has been extensively plundered and appropriated: Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham, Joan Didion, Linda Ronstadt, Warren Zevon. Jackson Browne’s connection to ’70s Southern California - he went to high school in Fullerton and came of age as a songwriter in Laurel Canyon - would also seem to prime him for this kind of comeback. Maybe more importantly, they led to hipster reclamation, that strange process of cultural mining where artists once thought past their primes find new currency with younger, cooler fans. Those collaborations led to new records and critical reassessments. ![]() Emmylou Harris, Johnny Cash, Loretta Lynn, Bob Dylan, and Willie Nelson all got calls from Rick Rubin or Jack White or Daniel Lanois. WHERE IS THE late-career renaissance of Clyde Jackson Browne? Shouldn’t he have had one of those by now? For a songwriter his age - Browne will turn 66 in October - the late-career surge has practically become a rite of passage.
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