The 2007 Eagles song Don Henley called his greatest work: “The best I’ve ever done”
When Don Henley grew up making music, there was no such thing as a grown-up rock and roll star.
There seemed to be only a finite time in which someone could consider themselves a teenage music legend, and even if the Eagles carried on for the better part of a decade, there were always going to be questions as to whether they had anything left to say during their solo careers. But there were always those songs to remind Henley that he didn’t have to give up his job as soon as he turned 35.
This was the era of the singer-songwriter, and even though many of Henley’s friends got their foot in the door when they were young, it was all about finding the right lyric to whatever they were working on. Their audiences wanted to hear their advanced takes on life instead of the usual party music, and if Randy Newman could force his way through one album at a time, Henley was going to do the same thing with his solo career.
It definitely had a shaky start when working on the album I Can’t Stand Still, but by the time that The End of the Innocence came out, Henley was threading that musical needle that so many other artists could never do. Anyone who had been around as long as he had normally had a few songs that were embarrassing to go back to, but Henley was somewhere in between genuine rock and roll anger and adult contemporary whenever he turned on his ballad voice for tunes like ‘New York Minute’.
But that wasn’t going to satisfy him as much as Eagles. They had reached the end of their rope by the 1980s, but Henley never wanted to leave the group in the first place. He liked having a team by his side, and when Glenn Frey floated the idea of the band getting back together for Hell Freezes Over, it was a slow crawl before they were officially ready to release a collection of new tunes.
‘Get Over It’ was proof that they could still write great songs together, but Long Road Out of Eden was the result of working meticulously on everything. Does it all work? No. The album is a bit overly long, and even Henley has said that there are a few songs that he would have cut if given the opportunity, but he knew that there was no way of replacing a tune like ‘Waiting in the Weeds’ in their catalogue.
He had grown into a much more mature songwriter, and his collaboration with Eagle adjacent member Steuart Smith was a cut above anything that he had ever made, saying, “‘Waiting in the Weeds,’ written with Steuart Smith, is my favorite song from Long Road Out of Eden, the album we put out in 2007. I think it’s some of the best work I’ve ever done.” And that’s probably because of the influence that he wears on his sleeve during most of the song.
Eagles were never afraid to pull from American history in many of their tunes, but this is by far the most poetic song that Henley ever wrote for the band. All that time studying other songwriters and writers like Ralph Waldo Emerson truly paid off, and with every single verse, you can clearly see a picture of someone who has been left behind in their life and watching some of their loved ones in individual photographs throughout their past.
This kind of slower ballad wasn’t going to replace tunes like ‘Life in the Fast Lane’ in the setlist by any means, but when you look at the way that the band works off each other, you can tell that they understood every word that Henley wanted to get across. This was the same kind of message song that he made on tunes like ‘The Last Resort’, and he wasn’t going to rest until he felt like he pushed himself far enough.
