Jackson Browne / Saturate Before Using by Jackson Browne

Jackson Browne's self-titled debut came out on Asylum in 1972, though plenty of people know it by a title it never officially carried: Saturate Before Using. Browne was no rookie by then. He'd been a working songwriter in Los Angeles since his teens, and other singers had already done well with his songs before he got around to cutting his own.

He made up for lost time. The album threw off two singles, the jaunty "Doctor, My Eyes", which climbed to number 8 on the pop chart, and "Rock Me on the Water", which got to number 48, while the album itself stalled at number 53 on the Billboard 200. Modest numbers, maybe, but a pattern was set: each of his next few records climbed higher on the album chart than the last, and this is where the earnest, searching voice that carried them first came through.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.