1976 · Behind the Songs
His wife’s mother handed him an unfinished lyric — and Browne turned it into his most personal hit.
Few hit singles arrive with a stranger or sadder origin story. “Here Come Those Tears Again” is credited to Jackson Browne and Nancy Farnsworth — the mother of Browne’s wife, the model and actor Phyllis Major — and it grew out of words Farnsworth herself had written. According to the song’s commonly told origin story, Farnsworth had an unfinished lyric she asked Browne to look at; he was struck by what she had written and wove it into a finished song of his own. It is the only major Browne hit with a family co-writer, and it carries the weight of the year that produced it: 1976, when The Pretender was recorded in the shadow of Phyllis Major’s death that March, an overdose widely described as an apparent suicide.
The song was released as a single in January 1977 on Asylum Records, with “Linda Paloma” on the B-side, produced by Jon Landau and running three minutes and twenty-seven seconds. The lyric watches a lover who has left — who needed to be free — and follows the narrator through the stages of reaction: the hope that she might return, the anger at her leaving, and finally a quiet, devastating rejection. Billboard heard “an archetypal love-lost adult ballad,” and Cash Box praised both its lyric and its melody. It was the sound of a man writing his way through grief in public, with the words of his late wife’s mother folded into his own.
The record’s chart journey was steady rather than spectacular, which suited a song this heavy. It entered the Billboard Hot 100 on 5 February 1977 at No. 64 — the highest debut of that week — and climbed to No. 23 over a nine-week run, making it the eighth-highest-charting single of Browne’s Hot 100 career. It did even better with adult listeners, reaching No. 15 on the Adult Contemporary chart, and it reached No. 19 in Canada. Asylum also released it as a single in the United Kingdom, Germany, and Japan, a sign of how seriously the label took Browne’s international standing by 1977.
The session band gives the track its particular ache. John Hall of Orleans plays the guitar solo, a crying lead that answers Browne’s vocal line for line. Billy Payne — best known from Little Feat — plays piano, and Mike Utley plays organ, while the rhythm section of Jim Gordon on drums, Bob Glaub on bass, and Fred Tackett on acoustic and electric guitar keeps everything grounded. The backing vocals are a masterstroke of casting: Bonnie Raitt and Rosemary Butler, two voices that understand heartbreak as a profession, hovering behind Browne like memory itself. Producer Jon Landau, who would soon become famous for his work with Bruce Springsteen, keeps the whole thing restrained — this is a record that knows shouting would ruin it.
Critics and historians have been kind to the song in retrospect. Ultimate Classic Rock ranked it the eighth-greatest Jackson Browne song, and Classic Rock History placed it even higher, at number three. Those rankings reflect something the 1977 charts only hinted at: the song has outlasted almost everything around it on the radio that winter. Its reputation rests on the writing, which compresses an entire failed reconciliation into three and a half minutes without a wasted line, and on the singing — Browne at his most exposed, never hiding behind the band.
Within The Pretender, the song is the emotional keystone. The album, recorded while Browne was living through the worst year of his life, moves between numbness and searching, and “Here Come Those Tears Again” is the moment the numbness cracks. The title track would become the album’s philosophical center, but this song is its beating heart — the one where the grief has a name, a melody, and, remarkably, a co-writer from inside the family. That Nancy Farnsworth’s words sit at the center of it adds a layer no other Browne song has: this is not just a man writing about loss, but a family writing about it together.
What to listen for: Hall’s guitar solo, which might be the finest minute of lead guitar on any Browne record; Payne’s piano, understated until the exact moments it needs not to be; and the way Raitt’s and Butler’s backing vocals seem to arrive from inside the narrator’s own head. Notice too the discipline of the arrangement — no strings, no crescendo, just a band playing a sad song straight. Landau understood that the lyric was already at maximum intensity and that the music’s job was to hold it steady.
The family dimension of the song remains its strangest and most moving fact. Hit singles are usually written in professional songwriting rooms, by professionals, for the market; this one grew out of an unfinished lyric by the singer’s mother-in-law, finished by a grieving husband in the months after his wife’s death. That Nancy Farnsworth’s words sit inside a Top 40 record — a song that entered the Hot 100 at No. 64, the highest debut of its week, and climbed to No. 23 — is a reminder that the charts occasionally make room for real life. The song’s Adult Contemporary peak at No. 15 suggests who was listening hardest: adults, who knew exactly what the tears were about.
“Here Come Those Tears Again” remains one of the most beloved songs Browne ever released, and its chart peak of No. 23 has come to seem almost irrelevant to its stature. It is the rare hit that feels like a private document — a collaboration across generations of one grieving family, set to music by a man who had every reason to stop writing and wrote anyway. The tears in the title keep coming, year after year, for new listeners. That is what happens when a song tells the truth: it never finishes its work.