The 1962 album Billy Joel and Don Henley called the greatest: “That changed my life”
Billy Joel and Don Henley have always been cut from the same cloth to some extent.
Neither of them is playing remotely the same style of music, but when you look at the way they approach their songs and the subjects they want to write about, they were always looking out for the little guy in rock and roll as opposed to sounding like the king of the world every time they played. They never lost sight of the average Joe in their music, but they did understand that some artists needed to be superhuman to pull off some of the records that they made.
Then again, Joel always seemed to treat his music like it was a job in many respects. It was one of the best gigs that anyone could have had, but it was hard work for Joel to get any of his songs finished whenever he worked on them. The River of Dreams may have been the last time that we heard him make a major work of art, but both he and Henley knew the importance of keeping their voices in shape whenever they played live.
There’s a lot more pressure on Henley, considering he was part of the greatest vocal group in America, but that was never going to be a challenge for him. Henley learned a long time ago that it was all about the emotion that you bring across every single time you make a song, and while he does have to take a song like ‘The Boys of Summer’ down a few keys whenever he sings it these days, he was happy to have that grit in his voice because it gives a lot more depth to his music.
Anyone can tell that Henley has some wisdom in his voice, and that’s what he had been shooting for ever since working on an album like Desperado. He was desperate to have one of his songs sound like Ray Charles when he first got together with Glenn Frey to start writing, but he knew that there was no one who would dare to touch what Ray Charles did when he dipped his toes into country music.
Charles was already known for some of the greatest R&B music ever created, and Henley felt that his voice singing country was a match made in heaven, saying, “This man is my favourite singer of all time, and he has never been known necessarily as a Country artist, but he did a groundbreaking album back in the 1960s called Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music. That album changed my life. I wore out at least two vinyl copies of it. It had some wonderful songs on it.”
And while Joel was the last person to put on a faux country accent and start singing about living on a farm, Charles was the one who helped him understand what country music was all about with that album, saying, “Now, I didn’t use to like country/western music. I grew up in New York City, and there’s no country/western music radio in New York City. [But Ray] was a Black man who sings the blues, [and he] did a country/western album. And all of the sudden, I got it! I liked country music! And ever since then, I really wanted to sing just like Ray Charles.”
Joel wasn’t going to be able to sing about what life was like in Georgia, but both he and Henley got a lot of their stories by seeing what was around them. Henley could paint with broad strokes every single time he talked about how we treat our planet, but Joel could be a lot more down-to-Earth on his songs as well, to the point where Garth Brooks could pull off a decent version of ‘Shameless’.
When someone is listening to Charles play, it is about so much more than hearing a singer annihilate every performance. It was about bringing the song across effectively, and even though Charles didn’t need to have the firsthand experience of a country singer, he was every bit as good as anyone in Nashville back in 1962.
