The Eagles bandmate who taught Don Henley everything about American music: “I learned a lot from him”
Most associate Eagles with lighthearted Californian soft rock, with hits like ‘Hotel California’ epitomising their broader reputation and appeal.
While there are more delicate moments throughout their discography, the passion project that brewed between Don Henley and Glenn Frey immediately flourished into something far more layered, taking the best of American music and reflecting the country’s rise and fall.
Even ‘Hotel California coasts these lines, reflecting entrapment and disillusionment within American values and systems by using a metaphorical hotel that sells the dream only for it all to be a façade. Many might call this concept by its other name, the American dream, with Eagles’ critique presenting both their ability to converge the real with the abstract, but mainly it stemmed from their own mixed emotions.
After all, art rarely ever has a foundation if a musician isn’t drawing inspiration from personal experiences, even if it begins with knowing how to stroke a paintbrush in exactly the right way or play the guitar with just enough inflexion to sound like an effortless mix of past, present, and future. In the beginning, Frey and Henley bothered themselves with this: exchanging musical ideas while still playing backing for Linda Ronstadt.
But Ronstadt didn’t mind. In fact, she openly supported and encouraged them, forming a mentor figure and helping them hone their craft until they were ready to go out and be the Eagles. That apprenticeship proved invaluable. Before they became one of America’s biggest bands, Frey and Henley were learning first-hand how a professional touring act operated, giving them the confidence to blend their songwriting ambitions with the discipline required to sustain a career beyond a handful of hit singles.
During these years, finding a sound almost always swirled from knowledge because having a keen eye for the masters of times gone by and understanding why and how music resonates is always the best springboard, one that the Eagles had full access to from day one.
Well, according to Henley, a lot of this was Frey’s doing. Henley always admired Frey’s know-how and how he could swing old American tropes into new, Eagles-sounding ones, taking nostalgic sounds and making them fresh with societal and cultural relevance. This wasn’t as obvious to Henley at first, but with subtle nods to old pioneers and Frey’s immediate understanding of those he referenced, it became clear.
“I would learn that Glenn had an encyclopedic knowledge of the canon of American popular music – everything from the Great American Songbook through the Delta bluesmen, through jazz and folk and rockabilly, early rhythm and blues, ’60s soul, folk rock, country rock, modern R&B,” he said for Rolling Stone, reflecting on one particular moment when Frey knew who American composer Stephen Foster was, much to his surprise and delight.
“He was, of course, a student of the music of Motown, but also the sounds of Memphis, Philadelphia and Muscle Shoals, Alabama (Glenn detoured there on the Ronstadt tour to record),” he added, “He also knew the Nashville Sound and the Bakersfield Sound. I learned a lot from him and, I think, he from me.”
It was this shared education that became one of the defining strengths of the Eagles. Rather than drawing from a single tradition, the band combined country, soul, rock, folk and R&B into a sound that felt distinctly American without ever belonging to one genre alone.
This knowledge on Frey’s part was no doubt a massive aspect of Eagles’ own appeal. Though often deemed Californian soft rock, country, or folk, his approach largely centred on reframing the many facets of music history through a modern lens. He might not have ever been wholly privy to the struggles and characteristics of other places and times, but he knew how to bridge the gap, surfing the wave of what made their music so timeless.
Frey’s encyclopaedic knowledge of American music helped give the Eagles an identity that extended far beyond the “California rock” label they are often given. By filtering decades of musical history through contemporary songwriting, he and Henley created records that felt both familiar and forward-looking. It is that balance between tradition and reinvention that has allowed the Eagles’ catalogue to endure long after the era that inspired it.
