In November 1976, Jackson Browne released his fourth album, The Pretender. Side two opened with “The Only Child,” a song addressed to his son, Ethan, who had turned three on November 2. More than once, the song tells the boy to take good care of his mother. Ethan’s mother, Phyllis Major, had died that March.
Many listeners have heard the album as a record about her death. Jackson Browne has said that is not how it was made.
A Few Weeks Into the Sessions
Phyllis Major was a model and actress. Her son with Jackson Browne, Ethan Zane Browne, was born on November 2, 1973, and as a baby he appeared with his father on the cover of Rolling Stone. Jackson and Phyllis married in December 1975.
Early in 1976, Browne began recording his next album with producer Jon Landau. A few weeks into the work, in late March, Phyllis was found dead at their home. She had died by suicide. She was 30.
According to Best Classic Bands’ history of the album, the sessions stopped and did not resume until May. Browne was 27, widowed after four months of marriage, and now the only parent of a two-year-old.
What Browne Said About the Songs
In a 2015 interview with MOJO, Jackson Browne pushed back on the idea that The Pretender was an elegy. People tend to assume that a record released after an event must be about that event, he said, but these songs had been written before Phyllis died. There was one exception: “Sleep’s Dark and Silent Gate,” the album’s next-to-last track, which he wrote afterward.
“I guess that song could be considered cathartic.” (Jackson Browne, MOJO, 2015)
It is the one place on the record where he faces the loss directly: a short piano ballad, with strings arranged by David Campbell, sung from a sleepless night, looking back over the years.
A Song From Before
That makes “The Only Child” a song from before. It is a father’s advice to his boy about getting through disappointment, staying kind, and looking after the people he loves. It asks him to take care of his mother. It also asks him to take care of his brother, though Ethan had no brother at the time.
By the time the record reached stores, the boy it was written for had lost his mother, and the man singing it was raising him alone.
The Song With Phyllis’s Mother’s Name on It
Another connection sits in the songwriting credits. “Here Come Those Tears Again,” the album’s first single, is credited to Jackson Browne and Nancy Farnsworth, Phyllis Major’s mother.
As the song’s history is usually told, it goes back to a trip to Paris after Browne’s Late for the Sky tour, when Farnsworth asked him to look at an unfinished song she had written. Browne finished it with her.
Released as a single in January 1977, it climbed to No. 23 on the Billboard Hot 100 and No. 15 on the adult contemporary chart. Billboard called it an “archetypal love-lost adult ballad.”
November 1976
The Pretender arrived in mid-November 1976, the same month Ethan turned three. It reached No. 5 on Billboard’s album chart, well above the No. 14 peak of Late for the Sky two years earlier, and it later went triple platinum.
On the back cover, Browne printed Pablo Neruda’s poem “Brown and Agile Child,” in Kenneth Rexroth’s English translation, in full. The back cover photograph is credited to Browne himself; Los Angeles magazine has described the picture as Ethan playing in the Pacific surf.
Being a Songwriter and a Father
In a 2021 interview with Route magazine, Jackson Browne said that after Phyllis died, being a father became his main focus. He had hoped to fit songwriting and fatherhood together, and he told himself that if it ever came down to only being a father, he hoped he would recognize it and simply do that.
He did not claim he got everything right. He admitted he was sometimes distracted and did not always take the advice he was given, and he put it plainly: “you don’t get a notice in the mail saying you’re blowing it as a parent.”
The Boy in the Song
Ethan Browne grew up in Los Angeles and became a model, an actor and a DJ, with roles in Hackers and Raising Helen. In 2010, he took charge of Spinside Records, a new imprint of his father’s label, Inside Recordings. He later became a father himself. In 2022, Jackson Browne told Tru Rock Revival: “Ethan is a great father. He’s a great son, a great man.”
Ethan Browne died in November 2025, at 52. In November 2026, nearly a year later, Jackson Browne is scheduled to play three nights at the Hollywood Pantages Theatre in Los Angeles, his first full concerts since his son’s death.