The Don Henley song Billy Joel always loved: “It really moved me”
For all of his accolades, Billy Joel never stopped being a fan of music. By the time he finished his last album, River of Dreams, he could put together symphonies all on his own, but there were still a few attempts to switch up his style based on where music was heading in the age of irony. Joel was always one for earnestness, though, and he was incredibly moved the first time he listened to Don Henley sing ‘A Month of Sundays’.
When looking at it on paper, Joel seemed to come from a completely different world than what Henley was talking about most of the time. All the Eagles seemed to sing about was the pleasures and pitfalls taking place in sunny California, which wasn’t exactly going to sit well with a man who could be considered the patron saint of New York City.
Once Henley went solo, though, he started to take things down a notch and decided to talk about his roots. There were still traces of what the Eagles had been working with on The Long Run, except adding in a sense of maturity, as if Henley wanted to let everyone know that it was okay to be an adult rockstar if they wanted to. While Building the Perfect Beast is known more these days for being the kind of record that populates every dad’s record collection, those older rock fans may have been onto something. Sure, ‘Boys of Summer’ is still a classic from the 1980s, but alongside that is a mixture of Tom Petty-style heartland rock and the gentle shimmer of Henley’s old outfit on tracks like ‘Sunset Grill’.
But ‘A Month of Sundays’ is something different. As much as Henley liked to write about relationships or the greater problems with the world, telling the story about farmland changing through the perspective of a farmer is both beautiful and heartbreaking. Rather than showing someone’s life-changing moments over one song, Henley sings about this man going through his daily routine only to come home and have no one to share it with.
Joel was always more of a fisherman than a farmer, but he could recognise that experience in a second, telling Henley, “There’s a song you wrote called ‘A Month of Sundays’. It really got to me. That person in that song and the lyrics. I just got that guy. If you don’t have Building the Perfect Beast, go out a get it. It was a real good bonus.”
And it’s not like Joel wasn’t afraid to get his hands dirty in his songs, as well. Outside of his more dramatic fare like ‘Scenes From an Italian Restaurant’, tracks like ‘Allentown’ and ‘The Downeaster Alexa’ were equally as sentimental, talking about the struggles of the everyday blue-collar worker and trying to find the humanity in their struggles in the same way that Henley or even Bruce Springsteen could.
Given how well they are both regarded, it’s a shame that Joel’s theory for a supergroup with Henley and Sting hasn’t come to fruition yet. Yes, it seems like every dad rocker’s dream, but sometimes getting the right songwriters together for a tune could make ‘A Month of Sundays’ look like just the tip of the iceberg.
