A Somber Portrait of ‘One Tired Man’

A strong sense of a personal vision is what makes Jann Browne’s “Count Me In” so special. The most vivid example on the album--the one song that sets Browne farthest apart from mainstream country convention--is the harrowing “One Tired Man,” her portrait of a man willfully drinking himself into the grave. It offers no moral, no uplift, just a deep, bitter draught of sorrow and regret.

Browne drew the song from life: At home in Laguna Hills one evening, she got a call from an old friend that stretched far into the night as he rambled on about his wasted life and his desire to end it.

“He kept saying, ‘Call me Mr. Empty, I’m just Mr. Empty,’ ” recalled Browne, who later would incorporate the phrase into the rhyme, “Mr. Empty is my name / And me and the bottle are one and the same.”

“A lot of the lines I used were the things that were spoken to me in a terrible evening.”

The worst didn’t actually come to pass: “I had sent friends to make sure everything was OK” with her suicidal friend, Browne said. “It was such a relief to me [to learn he hadn’t killed himself]. But at the same time I had all this anger and emotion in me. It was my purging of something really dramatic” that led her to write a set of lyrics in a matter of minutes on the morning after the phone call.

Matt Barnes, Browne’s next-door neighbor and most frequent songwriting collaborator, says she was in tears when she showed him the verses. Given the lyric’s dark, intense character and close-to-the-bone inspiration, Browne said, she had “second thoughts about it going anywhere outside of a shoe box. But when Matt started coming up with the musical ideas, it started turning into such a strong song.”

Browne’s initial instinct was to give “One Tired Man” a sense of uplift at the end. She credits Roger Stebner, her husband, who sings harmonies and plays acoustic guitar in her band, with advising her not to tie up the story with a neatly palatable ending or moral, as mainstream country songs often do when they deal with darker subjects.

“That’s life,” Browne said of her determination not to shy from portraying situations that are bleak or unresolved. “That’s how it is. We have no guarantees on how it’s going to end. We experience these things every day, not knowing.”

“One Tired Man” ends devastatingly, on a helpless, bereft note, with a sketch of the suicide’s funeral:

All of his good friends gathered ‘round.

Some could not talk or make a sound.

Some say they saw it comin ‘,

They saw it comin ‘.

Browne’s formerly suicidal friend (“He’s still with us and kicking good these days,” she said) eventually heard the song and approved of it. “He said, ‘If you were inspired by the situation and could turn it into something for the good. . . ‘ Although I don’t know how [much for the] good it was. It was just a situation of truth, something I’ve experienced and don’t want to again.”