The 1981 song Don Henley can barely sing again: “I don’t know if I can”
Any singer, like Don Henley, is going to have that sweet spot in their voice where they can do no wrong.
Even if there are plenty of artists who spend years trying to make the best songs that they can, Henley knew his strengths and could usually get through some of the greatest vocal performances that he ever gave in only a few minutes while the rest of the band looked on in awe. But time can be all too cruel to singers, and Henley knew that there were a few tunes that weren’t going to spend as much time in the setlist as they used to because of how much of a challenge they were.
Then again, the older generation of rock and roll bands are no strangers to tuning down every once in a while. No one can really expect to sound like they are in their 20s for the rest of their lives, and even if Henley still had that distinct gravel in his voice all the way up to the final Eagles album, there was no way that he was going to be going for it the same way that he was when making the vocal leaps on ‘One of These Nights’ in 1975.
It’s impossible to imagine him even doing justice to a song like ‘The Boys of Summer’ because of how high it is, but Henley could usually work around every tune that he tackled. ‘Desperado’ is still firmly intact in all of their live shows, and there are even some songs that sound a lot better as he entered his older age like ‘Hotel California’, but getting the chance to sing with Stevie Nicks on her first album turned out to be an extremely mixed blessing when he first duetted on ‘Leather and Lace’.
But it’s not like anyone else could have filled that role the same way that Henley could. Nicks was making one of the biggest leaps of her career when she walked away from Fleetwood Mac, and since she already had the song on hand to give to Waylon Jennings, the next best thing was to have a genuine country rocker sing along to the tune right beside her. Henley was never one to back down from a challenge, but he did know when the song finally left his range.
Considering how high the vocal was for him, though, Henley felt that there was a slim chance that he could ever make the song work these days, saying, “I didn’t think about [the significance of] it. [But] I don’t know if I can sing it now. Last time I sang it with her was when she was inducted to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame as an individual artist [in 2019]. It’s a challenging song.”
The main melody of the song isn’t all that difficult to wrap one’s voice around, but the fact that Henley sang the high harmony was already outside of his comfort zone at the time. For any duet between a male and female, the male would usually take the lower harmony, but with Henley being the overachiever and all-around vocal master that he is, the fact that he managed to get the whole thing done with no problem just speaks to the kind of vocalist that he always was back in the day.
But even if he could make a decent tune with Nicks didn’t mean that he needed to keep coming back to it, either. Nicks was more than happy to make tunes of her own, and throughout the years, you could practically hear Henley getting more comfortable in his midrange, usually only pulling out the falsetto and the much higher notes for special occasions on tunes like ‘New York Minute’.
Some of those high notes might be gone these days, but that doesn’t mean that he’s a worse singer for it now by any stretch. He was simply a different singer once he lost those notes, and given how a lot of his later records talk about the simple pleasures of life that are slipping away, getting a little bit of that gritty drawl in his voice works a lot better than the falsetto that he worked on for so many years.
