The Eagles songs Don Henley was too highly strung to write: “Do I really give a shit?”
As is the case with virtually every artist who has endured a high level of success and managed to maintain their audience, the Eagles can only have reached the level of fame they achieved by doing something that connected with their audience.
Now, this is in no way meant as a criticism, but their brand of soft rock was pretty inoffensive, and rarely did they find themselves putting up any major barriers to the listener by throwing in needless complications and experimental flourishes. Eagles, as a band, were all about sonically caressing their listener rather than alienating them, and any change to the formula that had made them successful would undoubtedly have rocked them.
What’s more, these songs weren’t just accessible, but handled with the utmost care. Nothing about their work seemed as though it was thoughtlessly included just to fill a space, and everything that they released on record was very deliberately placed there to serve a purpose, thanks in no small part to the fact that the members held themselves accountable for reaching the same high standards all the time.
They had multiple skilled songwriters on board at all points, with Don Henley and Glenn Frey being the two most prolific and demanding of the group from start to finish. That being said, the contributions by the likes of Bernie Leadon and Joe Walsh, despite not being as frequent, were still valuable to the band’s overall sound, and having different voices contribute different ideas prevented things from ever truly getting repetitive or going stale.
However, not all of them seemed to want to be moving in this direction at all times, and while there was certainly a formula in place that the band leaned into that they knew would work, there was one detractor in their ranks who thought that it might do them some good to shift gears and go for something a little more lighthearted rather than overtly serious.
Henley expressed in a 1975 interview with Rolling Stone that he’d much rather avoid writing in a certain way just because the band were so heavily associated with it, and that he had other ambitions for the band that were slightly outside of the comfort zone they’d established for themselves.
“Every time I start writing one of these wonderfully sensitive songs that we write, I start wondering, ‘Who really gives a shit?’ Do I really give a shit?” he pondered during the interview, as if to say he was going through a major identity crisis and was desperate to change tack.
“I want to do something semi-humorous on one of these records someday,” he continued. “Something that doesn’t demand so much fuckin’ time and energy. We’ve never had an easy time making Eagles albums.”
While this claim that their albums took the wind out of his sails due to how much attention they had to pay to the creative process, it was also clear that this acute attention to detail was what made them special, and dialling this down could have been a major risk.
Obviously, Henley stuck it out for a few more years before the band collectively called it quits, but then it’s not like his solo career was a barrel of laughs either, so it’s not exactly clear what he was making such a fuss about when it comes to injecting a bit of humour into the band’s work.
