One of the most uniquely recorded albums of the 70s is “Running on Empty” an album that shares the name with the opening song on the album by Jackson Browne.
Jackson wrote “Running on Empty” during the making of The Pretender album. That was his fourth album from a year earlier in 1976. He told Rolling Stone magazine, “I was 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.” So that got him the lyrics “Running on Empty.”
Jackson Browne also said during this time he was very exhausted. He was here, there and everywhere recording in studio, going on the road. It was a very stressful and tiring time in his life, and he felt like he was literally running on empty.
The song is the title track from his 1977 album Running on Empty. The album is sort of a live album. Most of the songs are recorded live. Some of them, though, were recorded in hotel rooms, on the road somewhere in buses, or backstage. It really captures life on the road, especially for Jackson Browne during this time.
The song itself was recorded live in 1977 in Columbia, Maryland. You can actually hear the crowd in the background, and this is the official released recording.
The album received two Grammy nominations in 1979 for Album of the Year and for Pop Male Vocal Performance for the song “Running on Empty.”
One interesting detail is the lyric, “In ’65 I was 17, in ’69 I was 21.” Those actually line up. I know in other songs like Bryan Adams’ “Summer of ’69” they don’t line up. Bryan was 9 in 1969, but Jackson Browne actually was 17 in 1965.
What makes “Running on Empty” such a great song is that it came from a real place. Between the empty gas tank, the constant travelling and the exhaustion of life on the road, Jackson Browne took what he was living at the time and turned it into one of the most recognizable songs of his career.
