Running on Empty

Recorded onstage, backstage, in three different hotel rooms, and on a Continental Silver Eagle tour bus during a cross-country tour in 1977, the Running on Empty album is a paean to life on the road. The title track, along with "The Load-Out/Stay," was recorded live during a concert at the Merriweather Post Pavilion in Columbia, Maryland on August 27, 1977.

"Running On Empty" is a popular metaphor for being exhausted, but the phrase had a much more literal meaning for Browne when it came to him. Browne wrote it while he was driving back and forth to the studio each day to make his album The Pretender. He told Rolling Stone: "I was always driving around with no gas in the car, I just never bothered to fill up the tank because - how far was it anyway? Just a few blocks."

Unlike Bryan Adams, who was 9 years old in the summer of '69, the timeline in "Running On Empty" is accurate: Jackson Browne really was 17 in 1965 and 21 in 1969 (when he "called the road my own").