by William Ruhlmann
On his third album, Jackson Browne returned to the themes of his debut record (love, loss, identity, apocalypse) and, amazingly, delved even deeper into them. &For a Dancer,& a meditation on death like the first album's &Song for Adam,& is a more eloquent eulogy; &Farther On& extends the &moving on& point of &Looking Into You&; &Before the Deluge& is a glimpse beyond the apocalypse evoked on &My Opening Farewell& and the second album's &For Everyman.& If Browne had seemed to question everything in his first records, here he even questioned himself. &For me some words come easy, but I know that they don't mean that much,& he sang on the opening track, &Late for the Sky,& and added in &Farther On,& &I'm not sure what I'm trying to say.& Yet his seeming uncertainty and self-doubt reflected the size and complexity of the problems he was addressing in these songs, and few had ever explored such territory, much less mapped it so well. &The Late Show,& the album's thematic center, doubted but ultimately affirmed the nature of relationships, while by the end, &After the Deluge,& if &only a few survived,& the human race continued nonetheless. It was a lot to put into a pop music album, but Browne stretched the limits of what could be found in what he called &the beauty in songs,& just as Bob Dylan had a decade before.