“Makes it special”: Joe Walsh on the singers that make any song better
Any member of Eagles was going to understand the importance of great harmony singing. Even if they only had to sing nursery rhymes for the rest of their lives, those soaring voices over top of their classic hits would have made tunes like ‘Old MacDonald’ sound like a country-fried chorus of angels. Joe Walsh may have been a relative newcomer to the band when he joined halfway through their tenure, but he already knew the importance of getting the right singer for the right song.
That’s before getting to Walsh’s own voice. While it’s certainly unique compared to the rest of the band with its squawky tone, it never feels out of place, either. Bernie Leadon had already brought a slightly darker tone to the group with his voice, but hearing Walsh make his vocal debut on the song ‘Pretty Maids All in a Row’ was a great way of changing up the usual formula from what he was used to.
Then again, he was always going to be the jokester that everyone knew him as. People knew that Walsh was as wild as Keith Moon when he wanted to be, and even if that managed to cost a pretty penny in terms of property damage, Don Henley and Glenn Frey always understood why he did it. They were rock and rollers, and that meant getting into a little bit of misbehaviour.
When the country-rockers first formed, though, they were already drawing parallels to another massive group coming from Los Angeles. Compared to what Frey and Henley had been writing on tunes like ‘Take It Easy’, Crosby, Stills, and Nash had been taking that approach to the top of the charts for years. ‘Desperado’ was great, but it wouldn’t have been able to break through had something like ‘Teach Your Children’ not laid the groundwork.
Although Walsh had the ability to work with the greatest singers anyone could ask for in the Eagles, no one would have imagined that kind of luck would strike twice in the 2010s. When working on his album Analog Man, Walsh remembered getting both David Crosby and Graham Nash to sing on one of his tunes, which had become a certain strength reserved for other guitar stars like David Gilmour up until that point.
“I’ve had a good run and David Crosby and Graham Nash said they’d love to sing on [my song] and anything that they sing on makes it special.”
Joe Walsh
Walsh could normally get the job done himself, but he knew that there was hardly any song that couldn’t be improved by having Crosby and Nash behind it, saying in 2012, “I’ve had a good run and David Crosby and Graham Nash said they’d love to sing on [my song] and anything that they sing on makes it special. I’ve known them for a long time and they’re good people and brilliant singers; I couldn’t have asked for more.”
But the core sound of the band normally comes down to the chemistry at work whenever they sang together. Both Crosby and Nash are phenomenal in their own right, but there’s a certain symmetry in the way they sing that is only reserved for the greatest harmony singers in the world, whether that’s John Lennon and Paul McCartney working off each other or David Gilmour and Richard Wright on some of Pink Floyd’s greatest works.
Crosby might not be here any more to add his signature voice to anything, but looking at the other people who have collaborated with Nash in recent years, like Mike Campbell, there’s still that shine that everyone remembers from the late 1960s. Something is definitely missing now, but Nash’s high-tenor voice almost feels like a faint memory of the glory days of rock and roll whenever he sings.
