“I think I covered the most”: The Joe Walsh song he called overwhelming to listen to
The enemy of any great songwriter is writer’s block. There are many opportunities that lay before them whenever they have a blank sheet of paper and a guitar in their hand, but it’s easy to get a bit jittery knowing that some lines are going to be set in stone forever once an album is finished. Although Joe Walsh didn’t have those kinds of internal struggles most of the time, he did at least know a way out of writer’s block when it did come to him.
Then again, Walsh could have afforded to take his foot off the gas as a songwriter when he started working with Eagles. His songs were always phenomenal in the James Gang and his solo career, but given that he had Glenn Frey and Don Henley standing beside him onstage, what was the point of him trying to outdo them when he could add the perfect guitar lick to ‘Life in the Fast Lane’ or ‘Hotel California’?
Even for his role as lead guitarist, though, Walsh was the kind of creative dynamo that any other band would kill to have among their ranks. The band had already begun their victory lap to celebrate Hotel California, and yet Walsh was already midway through his solo career renaissance once he got some of his musical buddies to play with him on tracks like ‘Life’s Been Good’.
Right as the band was breaking up, though, Walsh already had a contingency plan when working on the album There Goes the Neighborhood. He was going to bring his A-game to Eagles when working on tracks like ‘In the City’, but when it came to writing the perfect lyrics, a song like ‘Things’ was about making the best out of a bad situation.
While the music behind Walsh is fantastic, there are always a few pieces of the song that come off as incoherent if you’re not paying attention. Some of the lines feel like they could have been taken from separate song ideas every time he gets to a new section, but for Walsh, making everything sound so in-your-face was the whole point of getting every subject down on paper.
Since his original ideas for the tune came from sketching out ten pages of song topics, what he ended up with was trying to cram every idea he had into one tune, saying, “I thought I should write this song about all the things there are – did you ever stop and think of how many things there are? So that turned into a song, and it’s a little overwhelming to hear the first time, but if you listen to it three or four times, I think I covered most of the things there are.”
As goofy a concept as it sounds, though, this was the best way that Walsh could have dodged the massive elephant in the room. Everyone was going to be wondering what he had to say about the way the band ended, so him writing about this kind of subject was a great way of him saying everything while also keeping his mouth shut. There’s a lot of rambling that he goes through in this tune, but it’s all in service to him being the lovable goofball most people always knew.
While no one’s going to find out the meaning of life by listening to Walsh go through every solitary thought in his head, it does give the tune an extra bit of charm. After all, the end of Eagles was going to be harsh on all of its members, and it’s tunes like this that reminded everyone that Walsh was interested in having fun before anything else.
