The band Glenn Frey hailed as the bravest songwriters: “We were always quite amazed”
There wasn’t anything Eagles made that Glenn Frey couldn’t tackle.
As much as the band may have been trying to reach the top of the rock and roll world, it was a lot easier for them to follow their muse than try to top the perfection that they set when they worked on records like Hotel California. But even if there were some songs that thought outside the box, Frey was knocked back when he heard what some of the other songwriters were doing once they reached the big time.
Then again, it’s not like Los Angeles was exactly lacking in great songwriters when he first came to town. Some of the biggest names in music in the hippie era were still lingering around, like David Crosby and Roger McGuinn, but people were already beginning to go in a different direction. Jackson Browne and Randy Newman had been showing everyone what could be done with a song outside of the traditional lovelorn lyrics, and Frey wanted to do the same thing when he began working with Don Henley.
Because if you think about it, there aren’t as many love songs in the Eagles’ canon as you would think. There are many emotionally-charged tunes, but they are all being directed at someone rather than singing about how they love this person. ‘Lyin’ Eyes’ is a commentary on the women that they saw chatting everyone up in bars, ‘Desperado’ was a story song about a cowboy putting down his arms for the last time, and even ‘Take it to the Limit’ had a far more inspiring message than the traditional ‘I love you’ songs.
But even in an era where the songwriting field was wide open, there weren’t many people even trying what Steely Dan could do. Donald Fagen and Walter Becker were definitely looking for a particular standard whenever they wrote one of their tunes, but even by the learning curve that most people were gauging pop songs on at the time, no one really had a description for what was happening in songs like ‘Kid Charlemagne’ or ‘Deacon Blues’.
Their commentary was a lot more sophisticated, but it also had more than its fair share of strange detours as well. None of the characters in their songs were exactly the most friendly people in the world, and they would probably be downright repulsive if you saw them in real life, but Fagen’s vocal inflexions and the way the band work off each other gave all of their songs just a dash of sympathy whenever they came on.
Frey was a far more straightforward songwriter, but he had to marvel at the chance that Steely Dan were taking every single time they made one of their classics, saying, “We were and are big Steely Dan fans. We were always quite amazed that Steely Dan were so brave lyrically. [They sang,] ‘They got the Steely Dan T-shirts’ [in ‘Showbiz Kids’] . They had lines in their songs where we would look at each other and go, ‘Whoa, would we have put that in one of our songs?’” And it’s not like you couldn’t hear that influence once they started reaching outside their comfort zone.
A lot of their songs were still poppy enough to get on the radio, but especially when looking at Henley’s material, he was a lot more brave in what he talked about over time. Not many people were willing to take on the business side of the music industry as much as he did on ‘Dirty Laundry’ or ‘The Garden of Allah’, but he was ready and willing to speak up for the injustices of the world every single time he wrote one of his tunes.
IT took a bit more courage to write lyrics like that, but if Steely Dan could manage to make such cynical songs sound so great, what was stopping one of the sunniest bands in the world from doing the same thing? They epitomised California sunshine, but the only way you can appreciate the sunshine is to have a few dark clouds coming in every now and again.
