The 2015 album Don Henley knew was unfairly ignored: “They barely played it”
The journey of any songwriter like Don Henley is to keep getting better as the years go on.
Anyone else can feel stagnant after a while and start making records that don’t necessarily appeal to anyone except the hardcore fans, but Henley isn’t just in it to keep spinning his wheels for the hell of it. He is into quality over quantity on a lot of his greatest records, but he understood that there was a certain time limit on when people had the time and the energy to care about him.
Then again, it’s not like Henley was having any issues once he left the Eagles. He was always going to be a superstar, whether he knew it or not, and while he did make his first album almost out of spite once Glenn Frey came out with an album, you could hear him slowly starting to come into his own as a songwriter across every single record. And most importantly, he did most of them without ever embarrassing himself.
And in the singer-songwriter genre, that’s a much more difficult tightrope to walk than it looks like. Even solo stars like Phil Collins have records like ‘Sussudio’ that everyone can have a good laugh over, but still appreciate ‘Another Day in Paradise’, but ‘The Boys of Summer’ and ‘The End of the Innocence’ are still pertinent years after the fact because you could tell that he believed every word back in the day as well.
Henley wanted to tell the kinds of stories that he heard about in small-town America half the time, and when looking at a lot of his greatest works, you can see a picture in every song. ‘A Month of Sundays’ is one of the finest tunes he’s written about the average farmer, but it turned out that he had a bit of unfinished business to attend to when he came back to the subject years later on the album Cass County.
The whole record was practically a love letter to the section of the country that helped raise Henley, but he knew he was facing an uphill battle when trying to give it to radio. He wasn’t going to play the game of promoting it on social media by any means, and despite being one of the most recognisable voices in the history of American music, he was more than a little bit pissed off when he figured that fans didn’t want to hear an old man telling them about the wonders of his life.
He knew that he had created a great record, but he figured that the rest of the world had ignored him for the wrong reasons, saying, “You know, Cass County didn’t get much airplay at all. They barely played it, and it’s because I’m over 40 or over 50. It’s called ageism. It’s all about the new, it’s all disposable razor cartridges now and it’s next, next, next – and it’s a shame. It’s a youth market, it’s all about the youth now, there’s nothing for people our age and it’s just wrong.”
To be fair, though, most country fans probably weren’t interested in someone talking about things that were so much better back in their day. This was the sound of someone being more than a little bit senile about the state of the world in a lot of people’s minds, but if you look under the hood of a lot of these songs, he had a lot more to say about not only his home in Texas, but the entire country. There was a sense of innocence that was slipping away, and it was going to take someone like him to remind everyone what would get lost if people looked too far ahead.
While Henley had already said his piece on the modern state of country music, the fact that he was still fighting for what he believed in was still commendable by most rockstar standards. Most multi-millionaires of his stature didn’t need to talk about the problems that they saw in the world, but the fact that Henley was still willing to speak his mind against the corporate side of the music business isn’t something you hear all that often these days.
