Keb' Mo', Earle give life to listless Browne set

Though singer-songwriter Jackson Browne has been injecting heartache into song for more than 30 years, he's not much for tackling the emotion on a gut level. In the creative world, Browne's a thinker not a feeler, a distinction he underscored Sunday during a career-spanning concert at Marymoor Park.

The show, just 13 songs in 75 minutes, truly came alive only during his frequent collaborations with opening bluesman Keb' Mo' and fellow singer-songwriter Steve Earle.

Browne's social criticism, his second interest after doomed relationships, played more like an op-ed column than a rallying call for fed-up folks. "Everywhere the good prepare for perpetual war, and let their weapons shape the plan, the way the hammer shapes the hand," he sang on "Casino Nation" from his most recent disc, last year's "The Naked Ride Home." Though his observation was righteous, his execution was merely ruminative.

Browne is positively rigid in his devotion to being mellow. On "The Night Inside Me," drummer Mauricio Lewak and bassist Kevin McCormick hurtled the song through space, but Browne himself sang with all the stage presence of a navel gazer. Throughout the show, he kept his eyes trained on the evergreens just behind crowd, rarely venturing more movement than a head bob.

Time and again the trip through his catalog lighted on characters tethered to their pasts. "The things I remember seem so distant and so small," he sang in "Fountain of Sorrow." "These days I seem to think a lot about the things that I forgot to do," he says in "These Days." And of course, from the set-closing hit, "Running on Empty": "Looking back at the years gone by like so many summer fields ... " Even the lover's dare he so skillfully portrays in "The Naked Ride Home" is a desperate ploy to recapture a better days of old.

Browne himself seems inextricably tied to the lost era of the singer-songwriter, more energetic than James Taylor, but not as adventurous as Neil Young or relevant as Bruce Springsteen.

Though opener Keb' Mo' is steeped in traditional country blues, at Marymoor he wasn't mired by the form's conventions.

But throughout his set, the guitarist and harmonica player undercut the orthodoxy that leaves most modern takes on the form stale. "You saw that coming, didn't you," he joked after an obvious line in "Over and Over." "That's enough," he said at one point, cutting a solo off before it wore out its welcome.

Mo' and Browne traded guest spots in each other's sets, and Mo' and Earle returned to the stage during Browne's encore for the Eagles' hit "Take It Easy" (which Browne co-wrote) and Earle's own "I Ain't Ever Satisfied." The closer brought a welcome dose of rock 'n' roll restlessness that finally cracked Browne's contemplative shell.