Don Henley names his “favourite group in the world”
Everything about the Eagles’ music radiated California sunshine from the first five seconds it started. Even if they weren’t the best of friends when they disagreed, hearing them harmonise with each other would make you swear that they had no problems to speak of other than cruising down the highway with the wind in their hair. There was a method to their madness, though, and Don Henley took everything he knew from this British band.
When looking at their music, you’d be forgiven for thinking that the group listened to nothing outside American shores. Even though they had many different influences, those elements of country always found their way into their best tunes, whether that was them writing a soft-spoken on ‘Desperado’ or going full-on bluegrass on tunes like ‘Midnight Flyer’ or ‘Twenty-One’.
But that was only one strength that they had. Looking back on their body of work, there are a lot more changes than people give them credit for, whether that was the duelling guitar harmonies on The Long Run, the detours into hard rock on ‘Life the Fast Lane’, or even when they managed to make disco drums work in a rock context on ‘One of These Nights’.
If it sounded good, it was worthy of being on an album, and that was the kind of mentality that Henley picked up directly from The Beatles. Whereas most people fell in love with the mop top British lads on The Ed Sullivan Show, Henley became far more interested in how they approached their productions whenever they went into the studio.
Because looking back at their track record, the Fab Four all had a specific standard in mind when it came to their records. Even if the last few were a little choppy, like Let It Be and The White Album, nothing would get past John Lennon and Paul McCartney if they felt it wasn’t good enough to make it onto a record.
While Henley did eventually give in to the more collaborative process when the band returned with Long Road Out of Eden, he still admired The Beatles’ approach to their records, saying, “To make this an authentic Eagles project, Glenn and I are going to have to co-write at least three or four songs together. I know how The Beatles did it in the final days, and that’s fine. That’s still my favourite group in the entire world. But I hope that we can do it in a more authentically collaborative fashion than that.”
Then again, it’s not hard to tell which songs are vehicles for Henley and vice versa. There is the occasional tune from Joe Walsh or Timothy B Schmit to liven up the mood, but listening back, a lot of the songs that turned up on Long Road Out of Eden are a bit similar to The Beatles’ final projects, with half of the track listing sounding like solo tracks from every artist stitched together.
But having a record sounding that is disjointed shouldn’t be too much of a problem as long as the songs are good. Even if there wasn’t an overarching theme like there used to be, the Eagles’ final hour never forgot the one lesson that every Beatles taught: if the song was airtight, nothing else mattered.
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