Late For The Sky＜完全生産限定盤＞

ローリング・ストーン誌が選ぶ＜史上最も偉大なソングライター＞の一人=ジャクソン・ブラウンの代表作にして名盤中の名盤『Late For The Sky』が、Inside Recordingsより待望の再復刻

ローリング・ストーン誌が選ぶ＜史上最も偉大なソングライター＞の一人=ジャクソン・ブラウンの代表作にして名盤中の名盤 『Late For The Sky』。理想と現実の狭間で苦悩する青春の傷みを繊細な筆致で描き切り、詩情溢れる歌声で語りかける "ジャクソンの最高傑作" との呼び声も高い3rdアルバムにして、70年代前半のウエストコースト・ロックを代表する作品(全米アルバム・チャート14位/1974年発表)。人気の高い表題曲や、のちのちのステージでも披露される黙示録的な代表曲 「Before The Deluge」 などが収録されている。ジャクソンの哀切を帯びた歌声と当時のツアー・メンバー(デヴィッド・リンドレーら)によるバックのサウンドとが補完しあい、詩情豊かでイメージ的な広がりを感じさせてくれる。本作は、2014年再発時のジャクソン・ブラウン本人の監修によるリマスター音源を使用。ジャクソン本人のレーベル=Inside Recordingsからのリリースとなる。

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