For Everyman (song)

"For Everyman"
1973 advertisement
Song by Jackson Browne
from the album For Everyman
Released	1973 (1973)
Genre	Rock
Length	6:20
Label	Asylum
Songwriter(s)	Jackson Browne
Producer(s)	Jackson Browne

"For Everyman" is a song written and performed by American singer-songwriter Jackson Browne. It is the title track to his second album For Everyman, released in 1973.

Shortly after releasing his first album, Browne left Los Angeles where he'd grown up. He moved to the Bay Area of California where he looked for a house. He was invited to live with David Crosby on Crosby's boat, The Mayan. He stayed there several months, not finding a home to rent or purchase, before going on tour to support his recently finished and released album. While staying with Crosby, Browne was introduced to two of Crosby's neighbors, who also owned boats. The two friends along with Crosby, often talked about fulfilling their idyllic dream of simply sailing off into the "sunset," presumably somewhere to the South Pacific. This was just a couple of years after Crosby, Stills & Nash had released their single "Wooden Ships" that contains the same theme. Crosby stated that the songwriters "imagined ourselves as the few survivors, escaping on a boat to create a new civilization." Browne admits that the dreamers were in a bit of a "fog," and composed his song as a response to their unrealizable dream. On his album "Solo Acoustic, Vol. 1," Browne relays the story that the song was written "having spent some time with some people who were planning to sail away... I mean, and they had the boats to do it in, they knew what they were doing, they kinda had it all planned... Well, I won't say that they knew what they were doing, but they had a plan."

As Anthony DeCurtis told it in a 1999 retrospective album review of For Everyman, "The title track of Jackson Browne's second album, For Everyman, was a response to the escapist vision of Crosby, Stills and Nash's 'Wooden Ships.' As violence, fear and paranoia overtook Sixties utopianism, 'Wooden Ships' (written by Crosby and Stills, along with Paul Kanter of the Jefferson Airplane) imagined a kind of hipster exodus by sea from a straight world teetering on the edge of apocalypse: 'We are leaving/You don't need us,' the song declared. Browne wasn't giving up so easily... (He) sings in his characteristic long, fluid lines:"

"Deliverance must come for everyone, Browne insisted, not just hippie troubadours," wrote DeCurtis.