The 1975 song Don Henley said featured his favourite vocal performance: “The big difference”
There was no sense in anyone arguing with what Don Henley brought to the table every time he sang an Eagles song.
Don Felder may have been “promised” a song to sing on Hotel California, but even if he was trying to make the best vocal debut that he could, there was never any sense of trying to compete with one of the greatest vocalists in rock at the time when they were making a masterpiece. They needed everything to be perfect, but it took a long time before Henley actually reached that vocal sweet spot.
But even when they were hashing things out on their first record, the label knew what they had on their hands with Henley. Glenn Frey had a fantastic voice as well, and the way they all harmonised was the sound that brought them together the most, but when you take a listen to ‘Witchy Woman’, it’s no secret why the label insisted on giving Henley another song to sing when they dug up ‘Nightingale’.
Henley had that husky tone that worked perfectly with their country-rock roots, but he didn’t want to be defined by that kind of music for the rest of his life. He could pay tribute to some of the greatest sounds of Americana when he could, but when looking through a lot of the best records they ever made, the band always wanted their music to be a melting pot of all different influences whenever they sang.
And while Joe Walsh certainly helped them get a rock and roll edge on Hotel California, One of These Nights was already a sign that things were changing. A lot of the country instruments were kept to a minimum, and while Bernie Leadon was getting more and more pissed off that their country roots were falling by the wayside, it didn’t matter to any of them when they started making a song like the title track.
There was no reference point for the band making something this catchy, but compared to everything else out at the time, the thought of them getting on the disco bandwagon wasn’t everyone’s first prediction. They didn’t go full-on Saturday Night Fever by any stretch, but when looking at the straight-ahead drumbeat and a groove taken from R&B, Henley had the chance to flex his vocal chops the same way that the Gibb brothers were doing.
The song itself is already one of the more challenging performances in the band’s discography, but Henley always felt that the tune was one of the best examples of what he could do with his voice, saying, “Singing the title track was a pretty big moment for me – particularly the falsetto parts. But I’d been singing in basically the same way since I was 17 or 18. The fact that I was singing original material was the big difference.”
It took a while to get that kind of voice out of its cage, but when Henley first figured out what he could do, there was no limit to where he could go. In fact, there are pieces of what he does on here that would come in handy once Henley started his solo career, whether it was working on the more R&B-tinged tracks like ‘All She Wants to Do Is Dance’ or even when he was performing live on a song like ‘New York Minute’ on Hell Freezes Over where he goes back into his falsetto.
Singing this way is always going to be a risky move for some rock stars, but Henley was an absolute natural when it came to getting the right sound out of his voice. No one’s expecting him to hit these same notes nowadays, but for all of the hours that he put into it as a young man, it’s safe to say that Henley has earned the right to officially retire a few of those notes from his repertoire.
