BROWNE’S BALANCING ACT

“LIVES IN THE BALANCE.” Jackson Browne. Elektra.

Browne is like a baseball player who hits a phenomenal 50 home runs early in his career and then spends the rest of his time in the big leagues in the shadow of that spectacular season.

Because he is still in his 30s, Browne’s playing days are far from over, but the mediocrity of each new release tends to make the days when Browne was considered one of the best and brightest of his generation (remember 1974’s eloquent “Late for the Sky”?) seem increasingly distant.

The good news is that after 1983’s woefully uneventful “Lawyers in Love” Browne is swinging for the fences again in “Lives in the Balance,” exploring social and political concerns with an ambition and focus that long have been missing from his work.

Browne, who produced the album himself, sends a couple of pitches to the warning track--and even lofts one out of the park: “Lawless Avenues,” a tale of cultural dead-ends encountered by Latinos in this land of opportunity.

The song (co-written by Nicaraguan Jorge Calderon) has a poignancy and heart that underscore the heartbreaking cycle where dangers are as clear and present as neighborhood street gangs and as complex and confusing as a twisted foreign policy.

The reggae-tinged “Till I Go Down” is an urgent declaration of will that benefits from the timeless, everyman quality that are at the core of the most effective protest music, while “Black and White” expresses the anger and impatience of a man outraged by the indifference around him.

Unfortunately, Browne strikes out elsewhere. The title track and “Solder and Plenty” are riddled with clumsy catch-phrases, and Browne’s attempt at a Top 10 epic, “For America,” is undercut by an instrumental design straight from “Miami Vice” and a chorus guaranteed to make you wince: “I have prayed for America / I was made for America / It’s in my blood and in my bones.”

If “Lives in the Balance” had been released during the passive ‘70s, it might have come across as a a rousing, even revolutionary statement. But the album--arriving almost a year after the rise of the socially conscious “New Patriotism” movement in American rock--seems both dated and unnecessarily preachy.