Jackson Browne was a teenager when he wrote “These Days,” a quiet song about regret that sounds like it came from a man looking back on a long, hard life. But when Browne finally released his own recording in 1973, the song had been changed by someone else. Gregg Allman had slowed it down, stripped it back and sung it with a weight Browne himself said he could not match. And Browne followed his friend’s lead.
A Song Written at a Kitchen Table
Browne started writing “These Days” in 1965 at his parents’ kitchen table in Fullerton, California, and finished it about a year later, as a high school junior. He has said he was drawing on the books and records he loved and on his own restlessness growing up in the suburbs. The first artist to record it was Nico, for her 1967 album Chelsea Girl, with a young Browne playing the fingerpicked guitar part himself.
Two Friends in Los Angeles
Browne and Gregg Allman became friends in Los Angeles in the late 1960s, when Gregg and his brother Duane were playing in a band called the Hour Glass. For a short time, the two young musicians were roommates. Allman later credited Browne with inspiring him to become a real songwriter. When Duane pulled Gregg back South in 1969 to join the Allman Brothers Band, the two friends lost touch, but Gregg stayed a fan of his old roommate’s work.
What Gregg Changed
By the time Gregg Allman made his first solo album, Laid Back, released in October 1973, he had lost two of the most important people in his life. Duane died in a motorcycle crash in October 1971. Bassist Berry Oakley died in another motorcycle crash in November 1972.
On “These Days,” Gregg took the song in a new direction. He slowed the tempo, took out a major seventh chord, and rewrote the closing lines into something more apologetic. Rolling Stone’s Tony Glover praised the track in his early 1974 review, and years later the magazine’s Anthony DeCurtis called Allman’s reading definitive.
Browne Follows His Friend
Jackson Browne’s own recording appeared on his second album, For Everyman, and the two records came out within days of each other in October 1973. Browne moved away from the fingerpicked style of the Nico record, and his arrangement leaned on what Gregg had built. He thanked Allman in the album’s liner notes.
“He really unlocked a power in that song.” (Jackson Browne, KGSR radio interview, 2002)
In the same interview, Browne made it clear he was not imitating Gregg’s voice, saying he could not possibly sing it the way Allman did. Speaking to The New York Times in 2024, he described his 1973 version as “very influenced by Gregg’s.”
For years afterward, Browne lost track of the song in his own shows. Other artists kept recording it, and he has said he eventually relearned “These Days” from the people who covered it before working it back into his concerts.
Two Guitars in Atlanta
On January 10, 2014, a tribute concert for Gregg Allman filled Atlanta’s Fox Theatre. During the show, Allman, then 66, walked out with Jackson Browne. Each carried an acoustic guitar, and the two old friends sang “These Days” together, a duet Rolling Stone described as their first. They followed it with “Melissa.”
“Twice as Good”
Gregg Allman died on May 27, 2017. Browne had spoken with him the week before, and told him how much his music and his friendship had meant. In the tribute Browne posted after Gregg’s death, he called him one of the most gifted singers of the last fifty years, and he went back to the song they shared. Gregg, he wrote, had slowed “These Days” down and felt it deeply, and he made that song “twice as good as it was before he sang it.”