I was watching The Royal Tenenbaums a few weeks ago with my daughter Katherine, enjoying its superb soundtrack, which includes today’s featured song. But it’s not Jackson Browne’s original – it’s a version by Nico (pictured left). Today’s post will, in a sense, be a double billing of the same song, with both versions appearing at the end.
These Days might suggest it was the product of long experience, but it was actually written by Jackson Browne at the age of 16. Nico’s version, originally released on her 1967 Chelsea Girls album, was re-popularized on the acclaimed Royal Tennenbaums soundtrack as aforementioned along with her recording of Fairest of the Seasons, also written by Browne and featuring his guitar. Gregg Allman also recorded a new arrangement of These Days for his 1973 LP Laid Back.
From The New York Times article below:
When he was 16, Jack Browne sat down at his parents’ kitchen table in Fullerton, Calif., and started picking out a tune on an old Kay guitar. In 1965, the fledgling songwriter and high school junior — inspired by books, records and his own suburban disaffection — began weaving together an existential number about loss and regret called “These Days.” It would be a year until he finished the song, nearly a decade before he recorded it properly. By the time Jackson Browne, as he would be known professionally, cut it for his 1973 album “For Everyman”.
“These Days” has rambled through the decades, morphing musically, changing lyrically and taking on added layers of meaning. “In that regard, it’s sort of like a folk song,” Browne said on a late August afternoon, sitting in the control room of his Santa Monica recording studio, Groove Masters.
“I come from folk music, that was my school,” continued Browne, somehow still boyish and bright-eyed at 75. “You’d learn several versions of the same song and adapt the parts of it that you liked and it’d become something else. That’s what’s happened with ‘These Days.’”
While introducing the song live, Browne recalled recording the song with Nico and Andy Warhol, and his impressions of its later use in The Royal Tenenbaums:
I wrote this when I was about 16… and then several people recorded it before I had the chance to. But I think I did play on the first recorded version. It was a record made by a singer named Nico, who had been in the Velvet Underground and was making a solo record. I didn’t play acoustic guitar, even though I played this very thing, ‘cause Andy Warhol, who was sort of managing her, thought she should sound more modern, so I played an electric guitar. Then they put a string quartet on it, that was really modern.
Jackson Browne later said about the use These Days in The Royal Tenenbaums: I forgot that I’d licensed them to use this song. And this is one of those things that comes to you in the mail and you don’t know what they’re talking about and you simply give them their permission. You’re sitting in the movie theater and there’s this great moment when Gwyneth Paltrow is coming out of a bus or something like that. I’m thinking to myself, I used to play the guitar just like that. And then the voice comes on and it’s Nico singing ‘These Days’, which I played on.”
[Verse 1]
Well, I’ve been out walking
I don’t do that much talking these days
These days
These days I seem to think a lot
About the things that I forgot to do
For you
And all the times I had the chance to
[Verse 2]
And I had a lover
But it’s so hard to risk another these days
These days
Now if I seem to be afraid
To live the life that I have made in song
Well, it’s just that I’ve been losing
For so long
[Verse 3]
Well, I’ll keep on moving
Moving on
Things are bound to be improving
These days
One of these days
These days I’ll sit on cornerstones
And count the time in quarter tones to ten
My friend
Don’t confront me with my failures
I had not forgotten them
[Outro]
Ah
References:
1. These Days – Jackson Browne – Genius Lyrics
2. These Days (Jackson Browne song) – Wikipedia
3. The Song That Connects Jackson Browne, Nico and Margot Tenenbaum – The New York Times
“The more I live, the more I learn. The more I learn, the more I realize, the less I know.”- Michel Legrand
Observation Blogger 
LOVE that movie. Great song, too. All the versions.
Yeah, that movie is something else. I wish I had a dollar for every time I watched it inebriated in my twenties. Seeing it this time with my daughter hit differently — I found myself quite emotional. There’s something about The Royal Tenenbaums that cuts deep: the way the family comes together through the father’s flawed redemption, yet each of them remains profoundly alone in the world.
Allman’s version of ‘These Days’ is quite similar to Browne’s, but I much prefer Browne’s voice and the instrumentation.
Great song. While I think Nico’s version is pretty good, I prefer Jackson Browne’s recording. But, given I generally really dig Brown, I’m probably also biased here! Also, thanks for flagging Gregg Allman’s rendition, which wasn’t on my radar screen either. I think it sounds great as well! Allman and Browne were good friends, and Allman really admired him as a songwriter.
I like Browne’s version over the others too, but Nico’s nearly unrecognisable take on it strikes me as so unique — if somewhat bohemian and world weary, yet kitsch and hip.
Jackson is great. Nico is so very hot 🔥 cool