Before the Deluge

Before the Deluge

Jackson Browne

This week’s music is a thoughtful song by American rock music singer-songwriter Jackson Browne, born in Germany at the U.S. Army garrison in Heidelberg.

Numerous unforgettable tunes with perceptive lyrics and effortless melodies hail from Browne’s pen, guitar, and keyboard. Music critics rate “Before the Deluge” among his ten best songs.

Its lyrics speak of the cycles of cleansing that seem to return to Earth in periods of thousands of years, but also of how difficult it is to maintain our dreams and ideals as we, and the Earth, grow older and more cynical in a wry and contemptuous political world.

Let’s not get washed away in the river of change but keep our spirits by focusing on that which is eternal.

Lyrics:

Some of them were dreamers
And some of them were fools
Who were making plans and thinking of the future
With the energy of the innocent
They were gathering the tools
They would need to make their journey back to nature
While the sand slipped through the opening
And their hands reached for the golden ring
With their hearts they turned to each other's hearts for refuge
In the troubled years that came before the deluge

Some of them knew pleasure
And some of them knew pain
And for some of them it was only the moment that mattered
And on the brave and crazy wings of youth
They went flying around in the rain
And their feathers, once so fine, grew torn and tattered
And in the end they traded their tired wings
For the resignation that living brings
And exchanged love's bright and fragile glow
For the glitter and the rouge
And in a moment they were swept before the deluge

Let the music keep our spirits high
Let the buildings keep our children dry
Let creation reveal its secrets by and by, by and by
When the light that's lost within us reaches the sky

Some of them were angry
At the way the earth was abused
By the men who learned how to forge her beauty into power
And they struggled to protect her from them
Only to be confused
By the magnitude of her fury in the final hour
And when the sand was gone and the time arrived
In the naked dawn only a few survived
And in attempts to understand a thing so simple and so huge
Believed that they were meant to live after the deluge

Let the music keep our spirits high
Let the buildings keep our children dry
Let creation reveal its secrets by and by, by and by
When the light that's lost within us reaches the sky