Song of the Day 3/25: Jackson Browne, “The Pretender”

We’ve now entered the phase of Covid-19 in which famous people, including well-known musicians, come down with the disease. The latest, at least as of this morning, is 71-year-old singer-songwriter Jackson Browne, who told Rolling Stone that he’s quarantined at home and that his symptoms are relatively mild.

Browne’s heyday, though not his commercial peak, was the early to mid-1970s, when many of his songs strove to capture the mood of what had been the community-oriented counterculture as it morphed into the dissatisfied complacency of the Me Decade. That period of his career ended with this, the last and title song of his fourth album, which he recorded after the suicide of his first wife, model Phyllis Major.

Critics mocked Browne mercilessly for calling the ice-cream man the “ice cream vendor,” but for my money the only unforgivable line is “get it up again,” as it doesn’t even have the need for a rhyme as an excuse.