My Top 1000 Songs #836: Running On Empty

[I've been writing up my Top 1000 songs on a daily basis--you can see them all in descending order by hitting the All My Favorite Songs tag.]

That's how I opened my book... Which I bring up because, just the other night, I had a long stretch of dream where Jackson Browne's "Running On Empty" was playing. Don't remember much about the dream besides the song being cranked up pretty loud in my head, though I'm pretty sure I was playing air guitar to the solo. I woke up, maybe around 3 a.m., and could NOT stop singing "Running On Empty" to myself. Never fell back asleep. Damn you, Jackson Browne!

Anyway, the album of the same name came out in 1977, when I was 11, and while it got a lot of radio airplay, I was still mostly in teeny-bop AM radio Top 40 mode, and the song seemed a little too grown-up for me. A few years later, when I had moved into FM-dial classic rock, it already felt a little tired, like a worn-out oldie from the past. Just a victim of bad timing I suppose.

I can't call myself a huge Jackson Browne fan--I still kinda associate him with the Eagles and other SoCal rockers I avoided as I pivoted into punk & indie music in the early 80s--but his early albums have grown on me. And this song in particular won me over, just an incredible piece of songwriting. Sounds spectacular, too.

Live 1979: