The 1994 song Don Henley couldn’t stand hearing: “Not his best work”
There was nothing that Eagles ever put out that didn’t go under the watchful eye of Don Henley.
If everyone else in the band behaved like the titular bird every single time they approached one of their songs, Henley had the ears of a hawk whenever he performed, and he could normally tell when every single member had been pushed to the best of their ability every single time that they entered the studio. But if you look at a lot of their biggest hits, there were certain times when Henley’s bandmates could see that there were a few lapses in his judgment every now and again.
Because as much as Henley liked all of his albums for specific reasons, he was quick to point out that not all of them were perfect. He had more than a few moments where he felt like some songs were too stupid or didn’t come up to the band’s standards, and while he could overrule some tunes, he wasn’t going to step on anyone’s toes too much back in the day. Or at least that’s how it felt when it came to his discussions with Glenn Frey.
Every single decision the band ever made came down to how Frey and Henley operated, and even when the band had an idea to reunite in the 1980s, Frey was the one to put a lid on that. He was the one who didn’t want to relive his past memories all over again, but when the Walden Woods Project put together a version of ‘Take it Easy’ with a video featuring all of the band members, the guitarist seemed to forget about that.
He wanted to remember those times when all of them got along well, and when Hell Freezes Over came out, it was like they had never truly gone away. Frey said as much when he claimed that their break had just been a long vacation, but their new material was what everything lived on. They wanted to present some new songs to the world, but even if ‘Get Over It’ helped get them over the hump, not every one of their tunes was exactly perfect, either.
Timothy B Schmit does have a fantastic ballad to his name on ‘Love Will Keep us Alive’, but ‘The Girl From Yesterday’ tends to be a little bit below what they were used to doing. ‘Learn to Be Still’ was already a Don Henley tune that seemed to be masking itself as an Eagles track, but when Don Felder heard Frey’s new track for the first time, he remembered Henley having a fairly unpleasant reaction to it.
Since Henley wasn’t going to rock the boat, though, Felder remembered the drummer keeping his opinions under wraps, saying, “If we hadn’t let them slip anything mediocre onto the disc, they wouldn’t have anything on the album at all. This was especially true of ‘Girl From Yesterday’. Don remarked, when Glenn wasn’t in the room, that his song was not his best work and that any country singer from Nashville could sing it better. I agree, the song didn’t sound very good, and it went down badly at our later gigs.”
But you can really see what Frey was going for there, right? The country music revival was going through one of the biggest upswings in history around the 1990s, but it’s not like the song was going to give Garth Brooks a run for his money. Frey was clearly one of the elder statesmen of the genre, but after spending time outside the genre, you can’t just waltz back in and pretend to be as good as you were back in the day.
If anything, the fact that Henley stayed in the adult contemporary mould helped him flesh out his songwriting chops a little bit more. Frey was always going to be a central figure of the Eagles, no matter what he did, but that didn’t mean that anything that he wrote was going to be treated with the same kind of respect that we put on tunes like ‘New Kid in Town’.
