The Eagles lyric Don Henley thought would have never worked: “I changed it back”
Every member of the Eagles had to give their approval before releasing anything. Even if Joe Walsh or Don Felder spontaneously crafted one of the greatest riffs known to man, it wouldn’t mean much if it didn’t fit within the context of the right song. While the whole band had a hand in shaping the music, Don Henley was especially meticulous about lyrics. He had an instinct for recognising whether a line would stand the test of time or age poorly upon release.
Henley’s prowess with words wasn’t by accident, either. He had been an English major throughout his time at college, and while most people focused on his golden voice when listening to tracks like ‘Hotel California’, there was always something underneath the surface that had a lot more to offer than the typical feel-good rock and roll. ‘The Sad Cafe’ could have simply been a breakup song, but looking at the context surrounding the band’s breakup in the 1980s, this was Henley reading the group their last rites.
So when they decided to reconvene, Henley’s partnership with Glenn Frey still had to be airtight. They could have played the hits on Hell Freezes Over all they wanted, but the real test of their creativity would be how the audience reacted to rockers like ‘Get Over It’ or cried along with Timothy B Schmitt on ‘Love Will Keep Us Alive.’
By the time the group started working on their long-awaited comeback album, though, a lot of the habits from Henley’s solo career started to creep in. Long Road Out of Eden is still an Eagles record from skin to core, but when listening to some of the padded songs like ‘Frail Grasp on the Big Picture’ and ‘Fast Company,’ it feels like a handful of lyrics would have been better served on the lost 2000s Henley solo album that never materialised.
While the title track is the kind of opus that Henley and Frey always worked best in, some pieces still felt of their time. Frey had originally started writing the tune about the Iraq War in the 2000s, but when Henley began working on it, he made sure to keep it universal, talking about the problems with the world now that the values that they sang about had started to fade away.
“I decided that it wouldn’t make a lot of sense with the rest of the song”.
don henley
Then again, Henley admitted to almost having a dated reference to the Internet on the record as well, saying, “I was originally going to write ‘weaving down the information highway’ because I get on my computer every day and there is so much crap on the Internet. In the end, I decided that it wouldn’t make a lot of sense with the rest of the song just to suddenly go over and start talking about computers and the Internet. So I changed it back to American highway just to make it broader in scope.”
And considering where music was headed by the 2000s, it was probably for the best. While some bands were still doing things the old-fashioned way by working with analogue tape, Henley criticising people using the Internet right in the middle of the iTunes generation would make them look extremely out of touch. That didn’t stop them from playing by their own rules, eventually cutting a deal with WalMart to give their fans the cheapest price for their record.
While the band did right by their audience by keeping their audience on the cheap, there is something incredibly funny about Henley nearly coming to blows with people in the digital age. He’s completely within his right to do things on his own terms, but considering the audience he was playing to, it would have been hard for the frontman not to come off like an old man if he decided to sing about the dangers of the World Wide Web.
