The one songwriter Bob Dylan and Don Henley agreed was the best: “Better than most”
Don Henley was always going to consider himself lucky if he made half the impact that Bob Dylan had during his lifetime.
Everything Eagles ever did was a love letter to all kinds of American music, and Dylan had practically become a piece of musical folklore by the time that Hotel California started climbing up the charts. But even though Henley was looking up to a man who seemed more like a modern myth, both of them had the same roots when it came to making songs that had a real message behind them.
When looking at both Dylan’s and Henley’s discographies, neither of them wanted to go down the same silly love song route that everyone else was. There were more than enough people willing to make music all about romance, but if they had a platform, they were going to do everything they could to make songs that mattered. They weren’t afraid of being a bit more cutthroat, and any number of their songs were willing to take on the bigger problems with the world every now and again.
But Henley’s ‘The Garden of Allah’ probably wouldn’t have been possible without the help of Dylan’s tunes. ‘Masters of War’ paved the way for a song like that to become a righteous takedown of the corrupt parts of big business, but Dylan wasn’t only focusing on the words, either. He could appreciate when bands could come up with great melodies, and a lot of his favourite melodies could be found in Randy Newman songs.
While Newman didn’t claim to be one of the greatest songwriters in the world or anything, it was the craftsmanship that always stuck out to Dylan, saying, “To me, someone who writes really good songs is Randy Newman. There’s a lot of people who write good songs. As songs. Now Randy might not go out on stage and knock you out, or knock your socks off. And he’s not going to get people thrilled in the front row. He ain’t gonna do that. But he’s gonna write a better song than most people who can do it. You know, he’s got that down to an art.”
And looking at what Newman can do with a lot of his songs, you can see where Dylan’s coming from. He was ready to knock the audience out with songs that had a lot more sophisticated melodies than everyone was used to, but when listening to the lyrics, Henley was struck by how much Newman could reflect the experience of the average American every single time that he sang one of his tunes.
Eagles have had the reputation of being one of the quintessential American bands, but Henley felt that Newman brought that Americana sound into a whole different area, saying, “[In his music], you can hear America, the way it was and the way it is. Randy Newman’s music is American to the core. It’s an unflinching portrait of America in all its sham and all its glory.” At the same time, Newman does one thing that not many artists are able to do all that often: he’s actually funny.
It’s not easy for any musician to walk that kind of musical tightrope all the time, but aside from him writing about more unsavoury characters every now and again, there are many times where he can write the most damning songs about ‘Rednecks’ and manage to also make it sound absolutely hilarious. That kind of balance isn’t easy, but the fact that he could write a song like that and then turn around decades later and write something as heartbreaking as ‘When She Loved Me’ is the mark of any good artist.
Because while many Dylan and Eagles songs can touch your heart in a profound way, Newman’s style is the kind of the thing that no one realises that they need in their lives until they hear it. His songs don’t have to be the biggest chart hits in the world, but imagining a world without some of those tunes would be like losing a piece of the sky.
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