Classic Tracks: Jackson Browne’s “Late For The Sky”

Has there ever been a more astute and moving evocation of the distance and weirdness that sometimes dooms a relationship than “Late for the Sky,” the title song of the masterful album of the same name by Jackson Browne?

“For [that album],” Browne told Bud Scoppa in 2010, “I had the songs pretty much written. It was the first time I’d sat down and written songs with the information of how I was going to record them. I went to Asylum and got $10,000 to rehearse the band for a month before we went in the studio… I just wanted the record to be like a band, and there were only the five people playing on the record. We rehearsed everything in a room in the house I grew up in, which my grandfather had built. [It] had stained glass windows, a pipe organ and a choir loft, high ceilings… It might have been one reason the songs sound kind of church-y… With ‘Late for the Sky,’ I had this one phrase—‘late for the sky’—and I wrote that whole song in order to say that one phrase at the end of it.”

The Top 20 album, which also contains the classics “Fountain of Sorrow,” “Before the Deluge” and “For a Dancer,” was recorded in mid-1974, primarily at Elektra Sound Recorders in L.A., with Al Schmitt engineering and co-producing with Browne. That track is spare in its instrumentation—just Browne’s piano, David Lindley’s guitar, Jai Winding’s organ, Doug Haywood on bass and Larry Zack on drums. It was cut to 3M 16-track in Studio A at Elektra, which had a 24-in, 16-out De Medio console (Studio B, where some work was also done, had a Sound Techniques board), JBL monitors and a Yamaha grand piano.

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“Jackson played and sang live with the band for almost everything,” Schmitt remembers, “and it went very smoothly. That whole album was done in 30 days—30 days straight without a day off. We mixed it at Hollywood Sound on the De Medio console there.

“One of the things I remember most is that every night when we’d finish, Jackson and I would get in the car and drive up to Mulholland [Drive] overlooking the Valley, and we’d sit and discuss what we’d do the next day. It was very cool. That album is one of the highlights of my career. It’s a very important album for me making it, as I know it was for a lot of people who listened to it.”