Hearts of Darkness

By Dave Thompson

"Hearts of Darkness" is the story of a generation's coming of age through the experiences of its three most atypical pop stars. James Taylor, Jackson Browne, and Cat Stevens could never have been considered your typical late-sixties songwriters - self-absorbed and self-composed, all three eschewed the traditional means of delivering their songs, instead turning its process inward. The result was a body of work that stands among the most profoundly personal art ever to translate into an international language, and a sequence of songs - from "Sweet Baby James" and "Carolina in My Mind", to "Jamaica Say You Will" and "These Days", to "Peace Train" and "Wild World" - that remain archetypes not only of what the critics called the singer-songwriter movement, but of the human condition itself.