Jackson Browne is his own best chronicler. The profile has yet to be written which reveals him as incisively, or with as much love for language, as Browne does himself. His struggles with love, mortality, innocence and the fall from grace have rung so true, and been described with such real yet elevated phrases, that he has become a man-child pioneer. The life and situations he has described have been close enough to a middle-class universal for both the sensitive and the banal to feel he knows their personal songs. He is his own subject and, to this point, his life has been sufficiently interesting to support a running, five-album autobiography. He has enjoyed the strength to show his vulnerability.

Running on Empty. I wish it were an ironic title. Browne's life, he says, is lived in large part on the road. It's a rock 'n roll cliche...