The most challenging song of Don Henley’s career: “It took me 42 years”
There is no formula for songwriting if authentic music is the end goal. While a room full of savvy industry professionals can spawn a song worthy of radio play within hours, it doesn’t come from the heart and is a cold-blooded way of creating art. Don Henley has always wanted to offer a piece of himself through his songwriting, which is fueled by the accumulation of life experience.
Most songwriters search their entire career for the perfect song, but for many, it never arrives, while some are fortunate to have carved perfection on multiple occasions. It wasn’t until Henley was a music industry veteran that he finally felt he’d reached this gold standard despite already releasing a series of hits and having household name status. While he had number-one records with the Eagles and became richer than his wildest dreams due to their success, it took him until 1989 to hit the jackpot from a songwriting perspective.
Henley later explained how everything had been building his entire career towards ‘The Heart Of The Matter’ from his third solo album, The End Of The Innocence. The Eagles founding member poured a million life lessons on love, loss, and heartbreak into the song. As a younger man, he didn’t understand how to pen a track as mature and well-rounded as ‘The Heart Of The Matter’. If he had attempted to write it a decade before doing so, it would have come across as phoney and lacking authenticity.
In the run-up to writing the song, Henley was forced to endure a period of self-reflection after breaking up with his fiancé. Before their romantic partnership erupted into flames, the drummer believed she was the person he was destined to spend the rest of his life with, and the realisation this wasn’t to be was a tough pill to swallow. Henley wrote the song alongside JD Souther, who helped pen countless classic songs for the Eagles. Similarly to Henley, Souther had recently split from his fiancée. However, one positive from their shared heartbreak was allowing it to shape ‘The Heart Of The Matter’.
Souther later explained to SongFacts how the process of writing the song was straightforward, but the hardship they faced along the way was anything but easy, stating, “At that particular moment, it was an easy song for both of us to work on because we had both, within the last year or so, broken up with our fiancées. We’d both been in love and engaged at the same time, and both his relationship with his girl and me with mine ended in the same few months”.
He continued: “And it’s pretty much what the song says, they had both taken up with somebody else. And that’s not easy to hear, but at the time it made a good source material for that song, because it seemed to be really universal and it seemed the only way to really survive your first reaction to hearing news like that or having those kind of feelings is to remember that the first person to benefit from forgiveness is the one who does the forgiving. And, actually, that was Don’s idea.”
Rather than writing a pissed off song about their former partners moving on with someone new, they instead chose to go down a compassionate route. This move showed a level of maturity from Henley, who was responsible for ‘The Heart of the Matter’ going in that direction, which he’d likely have never gained if it wasn’t for the challenges that life had thrown in his direction that gifted him a newfound perspective. Souther explained: “I have to give him full credit for that forgiveness theme. The first time he sang that forgiveness chorus over and over to me, I didn’t get it. Kind of went, ‘Yeah, I guess.’ And then it sort of sunk it that it was exactly the point of the song.”
During the Eagles’ Hell Freezes Over tour, Henley spoke about his immense pride in ‘The Heart Of The Matter’ and told crowds about the lifelong journey that led to its creation, stating, “It took me 42 years to write this song and 5 minutes to sing it.”
On ‘The Heart Of The Matter’, Henley pours his heart and soul into the track, using music as a coping mechanism for his pain. Although it’s about a personal experience related to Henley, it’s also about growing up and reacting to setbacks in an adult fashion. In his younger days, Henley’s attempts to explore this break-up would have likely led to a resentful-laden song, but 42 years of victories and defeats allowed him to see things clearly for the first time.
