Musicians

Jackson Browne

acrylic on canvas  
30 x 24 in

After painting Jackson Browne’s portrait, Joan couldn’t decide whether it belonged with her paintings of musicians or with her Mischief Makers, her portraits of political activists. “He covers them both,” she said, but in the end decided he should go in Mischief Makers. "He deserves to be in that group."

When Browne first came on the scene in the mid-1970s, Joan was attracted to his literate and passionate songwriting, the way it subtly reflected the zeitgeist of that post-Vietnam War era. She recorded his haunting “Fountain of Sorrow” on her “Diamonds & Rust” album and his “Before the Deluge” on her 1979 album “Honest Lullaby.”

Like Joan, Browne has been a committed activist from early in his career, co-founding the anti-nuclear Musicians United for Save Energy (MUSE) in 1979 and getting himself arrested protesting the Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant in California. His 1986 album “Lives in the Balance” was a seen as a condemnation of U.S. policy in Central America, the title track a denunciation of U.S. backed wars in Nicaragua, El Salvador and Guatemala. Over the decades he’s performed at benefit concerts for Farm Aid, Amnesty International, Seva, a nonprofit founded by Joan’s sister Mimi Farina called Bread & Roses, and other causes.

“He’s put himself on the line for a variety of things,” Joan says. “I have a lot of respect for him.”

 
Jackson Brown - Musicians