The one line Don Henley never wanted to write: “A big waste”
Don Henley didn’t become one of the biggest stars with the Eagles by accident.
He wanted the chance to show the world what he and Glenn Frey could be as songwriters, and on every one of their albums, you could hear them inching closer and closer to being one of the biggest names in rock and roll whenever they made a record. But when looking through some of their songs, Henley’s greatest strength was knowing when a song was perfectly written and when it needed to be tightened up in a few areas.
Because as much as Eagles have written some great songs, there are bound to be a few clunkers in any band’s discography. There were more than a few times where Henley said that their songs were a little corny at the beginning of their career, and even after they made some of their classic material on Hotel California, ‘The Disco Strangler’ off of The Long Run sounds like it’s coming from a band that ran out of ideas and is trying desperately to create something resembling a hook.
But even if Henley and Frey had a better way of calling the shots once they reformed, there were always going to be a few issues surrounding Long Road out of Eden. The album is just fine the way it is, and since we know now that it’s going to be the last thing ever released that bears the band’s name, it is a fitting conclusion to their career. At the same time, Henley didn’t want to settle for an album that was merely fine, either.
He said time and time again that he would have been happier if the album had been cut down a little bit, and there is a fair bit of fluff on there, in his defence. It’s hard to get every member of the band to agree on what songs needed to be included, but if there was one song that couldn’t be left out no matter what, it was bound to be the title track. This was the modern version of ‘Hotel California’, and Henley was going to slave away until it was done right.
Taking inspiration from the Iraq War, Henley spent every single verse trying to capture what modern America looked like. And while he did have a few references that aren’t exactly bulletproof on every single line, he knew that throwing in a lyric that was all about the slop that he found online was never going to work in his brain.
There was a time and a place for him to talk about his problem with the Internet, but Henley felt that he was better off keeping things universal rather than dating the album, 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. It’s such a big waste of time if you aren’t careful.”
Concluding, “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 we can all thank God that we didn’t have to endure a song like that from Henley at this stage in his career. He always had a knack for making more satirical looks at America, and while bringing the Internet into the equation would have been decent commentary, there are some moments where he would have come off sounding like an old man complaining about how his kids are on their phones all the time.
For all of the great commentary songs that Henley made over his career, he was never one to tell people how they were supposed to feel, anyway. He was more interested in making a decent song and having the listener try and make sense of it their own way, and bringing in a section of him grumbling about technology was never going to work.
