Making music is one of the greatest pleasures I've ever experienced — and I'm one who sought pleasure," Jackson Browne says with a quiet laugh on an early-autumn afternoon in a New York hotel room. But, he adds, "the heart of my activism is the belief that these pleasures are for everybody. If we continue what we're doing as a country . . . " He pauses. "We're all in the same boat. That's always been the subject of my songs. We only have a little time. It's a mess, so you do everything you can."

That urgency also runs through Browne's new studio album, Time the Conqueror, one of the best and most important records he has made because it combines his folk-rock romanticism and his political idealism in songs that are both pointed and reflective. In the late-Sixties high of "Off of Wonderland," named after a street in Los Angeles' Laurel Canyon, Browne looks back on his own merry adolescence. But he follows that with the dark, brisk march "Drums of War" that, Browne says, "is a call to arms. We've just been accepting someone else's description of who the enemy is." In the nine-minute Hurricane Katrina postmortem "Where Were You," Browne pursues the trail of failure with the detailed fury of Bob Dylan's "Masters of War." "Everyone wants to get to the bottom of things," Browne insists. "They want to decide and know. It's natural."

Born in the former West Germany and raised in Los Angeles, Browne — who turns 60 on October 9th — was a precociously successful songwriter, covered by Nico, Tom Rush and the Byrds, even before he released his 1972 debut album, Jackson Browne. By the late Seventies, Browne had defined the indulgence and interior examination of California-rock life on bestselling albums such as 1976's The Pretender and 1977's Running on Empty. But then he turned acutely topical, addressing America's imperial capitalism and swing to the right under Ronald Reagan on 1983's Lawyers in Love and 1986's Lives in the Balance. Now, Browne says, "One of the great affirmations is to play a really old song next to a new one, to hear how they resonate with one another."

He is doing that on his current tour, with a full band, connecting the pleasure and patriotism, history and new headlines in his work. "'Lives in the Balance' was about U.S. policy in Central America," Browne says, "but it's about much more. If I play it now, it's obviously about Iraq." But Browne looks forward to the day when he no longer needs to sing it. "Hopefully, it will become an artifact of the distant past."