The album Joe Walsh made during the worst time of his life
Joe Walsh was a revolutionary guitarist and songwriter. He could take a sound and elevate it; as a multi-instrumentalist, he could have an inkling of direction and then run with it, crafting beautiful pieces of music in the process. His work is still exciting to listen to this day, as the Eagles likely wouldn’t have become the band they did without Walsh.
Before he joined, they had already established themselves as music revolutionaries, combining country and rock to create a new style of music that was travelling around the world. However, when Walsh joined the band in 1975, he injected some much-needed venom into their guitar, which led to the creation of some of their greatest hits.
“When Bernie [Leadon] decided that he just wasn’t interested very much in continuing, Don [Henley] and Glenn [Frey] thought I would plug in really well with where the Eagles were eventually going to go,” said Walsh, “And at the time, I was going, ‘Aw fuck, it’s time to do another solo album. Oh, shit. Anybody got any ideas?’ You know? So, it all just kind of came together. I joined the Eagles – and the result, of course, was Hotel California.”
This period was important for Walsh, not just because it saw him elevate his career by joining the Eagles, but because he was going through a dark period before following the passing of his daughter. He was quite successful as a solo artist, and life seemed to be falling into place, but one day, his wife and daughter were involved in a car crash, and it had devastating effects.
“My wife was taking our daughter to school and some lady ran a stop sign and creamed our car,” said Walsh. “And I lost my daughter. And it was gory and all that.”
Songwriting came naturally to Walsh, so once his daughter passed, he started writing music to help with his grief. One of the songs that was a direct ode to his daughter was ‘Song For Emma’, which he put as the closing track for his 1974 album So What.
“To help with closure, I wrote this song for her,” he said, “And over the process of the next year, my wife and I, we just weren’t strong enough to get through the grief and so we separated and eventually got divorced.”
Though he tried to stay positive and use his music to inspire hope, Walsh’s lingering sense of dread and hopelessness plagued him. This is best reflected in the album title So What, as, despite lovely homages to his child on the record, the title is a throwaway as if Walsh doesn’t want to try and look for good in the world.
He admits this himself, as he said that the album came from what was easily the darkest period in his life. “I called it that because I had this ‘So What’ attitude,” he said when discussing the album title, “I was angry. I was really mad at God. And I felt that was a great reason to drink. ‘Poor me. God took my daughter away’. And so I got an attitude, like, ‘This is the worst thing that’s ever happened. I don’t care about anything’. Just to justify that it was okay to get screwed up.”
