Jackson Browne announces 'Downhill From Everywhere'

“My Cleveland Heart” available now

Jackson Browne has released his new single “My Cleveland Heart,” available to stream/purchase worldwide. The single, co-written with his longtime guitarist Val McCallum, comes from Browne’s forthcoming album Downhill From Everywhere, due out on July 23rd through his label Inside Recordings.

This week, Browne shared the music video for “My Cleveland Heart,” directed by Alissa Torvinen featuring a cameo by Phoebe Bridgers.

Downhill From Everywhere is Browne’s first new album in six years. Though the songs here were recorded prior to the tumultuous events of the past year, the collection feels remarkably prescient, grappling with truth and justice, respect and dignity, doubt and longing, all while maintaining a defiant sense of optimism that seems tailor-made for these turbulent times. Like much of Browne’s illustrious catalog, the album is fueled by a search — for connection, for purpose, for self — but there’s a heightened sense of urgency written between the lines, a recognition of the sand slipping through the hourglass that elevates the stakes at every turn.

“Time rolling away, time like a river, time like a train,” he sings. “Time like a fuse burning shorter every day.” And while such ruminations might suggest a meditation on aging and mortality from a rock icon in his early 70s, the truth is that Browne isn’t looking in the mirror; he’s singing about us, about a world fast approaching a social, political, and environmental point of no return. Clean air, fresh water, racial equity, democracy — it’s all on the line, and nothing is assured.

“I see the writing on the wall,” says Browne. “I know there’s only so much time left in my life. But I now have an amazing, beautiful grandson, and I feel more acutely than ever the responsibility to leave him a world that’s inhabitable.”

While the issues Browne tackles on the album are often sweeping and existential, he writes on a far more intimate scale, consistently zeroing in on the human experience at the heart of it all. Whether singing about a Catholic priest navigating the slums of Haiti on his motorbike or a young Mexican woman who’s risked everything in pursuit of a better life across the border, Browne manages to tap into a universal emotional language, one that makes the old feel new and the foreign feel familiar.

Despite his success, Browne’s never been one to rest on his laurels, and as Downhill From Everywhere proves, he’s still pushing himself some 15 albums into his storied career. Recorded with a core band that included guitarists Greg Leisz (Eric Clapton, Bill Frisell) and Val McCallum (Lucinda Williams, Sheryl Crow), bassist Bob Glaub (Linda Ronstadt, CSNY, John Fogerty), keyboardist Jeff Young (Sting, Shawn Colvin), and drummer Mauricio Lewak (Sugarland, Melissa Etheridge), the record is a truly collaborative work, one driven by group chemistry and an openness to new sounds and ideas.