The one musician Don Henley described as his “soul brother”
Any project Don Henley ever worked on needed to have the best people that he could find next to him.
Following up on being in Eagles wasn’t the kind of hand that anyone wanted to be dealt, but when listening to Henley’s solo career, there was no question that he was going to do just fine on his own. Those golden pipes didn’t have an ounce of shine on them, but he was still interested in seeing what else was out there than having to stick to singing heartland rock for the rest of his life.
But being a sincere songwriter in the adult contemporary world is a tough tightrope to walk. There are more than a few people who end up sounding way too boring compared to what everyone else was doing, and it’s not like Henley was any exception when it came time for him to work on his more cerebral records. He had his fun in Eagles, but The End of the Innocence was a lot more sturdy than most of what his contemporaries had been doing behind the scenes.
He was interested in learning the ropes with some of his friends, and he didn’t want to shoulder the blame if any of his songs didn’t turn out right. It’s never easy to jump right into being one of the biggest rock and roll solo artists in the world, but when he started hearing rumblings about what Mike Campbell was doing, it didn’t take him long to finish off ‘The Boys of Summer’ once it was presented to him.
Then again, Henley wasn’t looking to simply play over someone else’s backing tracks for the rest of his life. He needed an earnest collaborator to work with again the same way that Glenn Frey did back in the day, and while there were plenty of takers to work with, there’s a certain brotherhood that comes with working with other drummers. Each percussionist knows what the song needs whenever they put a track together, and Stan Lynch seemed to be the perfect fit for him when they started.
Lynch had been given the boot from the Heartbreakers a few years after working with Henley, but it was clear that he wasn’t getting to express himself yet. He didn’t have as much say in what the band was doing, and since Wildflowers was completely alien to him, it made more sense for him to work alongside what Henley wanted. And if you ask Henley himself, Lynch was the perfect foil to the kind of lines he was spitting out all the time.
Compared to the more biting commentary that Henley had been used, the way that Lynch could turn a phrase was what made a lot of his songs work so well on those records, saying, “We’re soul brothers, we can talk about anything: when you write songs with someone, you have to be real open with them, you have to be able to reveal the real philosophical, personal things, and Stan and I can do that. He’s also got a great sense of humour – he helps inject humour into songs that might otherwise be a little too dark.”
And when you listen to Henley’s music, you can really hear why Lynch is needed. It’s impossible to listen to an entire album that’s nothing but Henley stringing up the more egregious public figures of the world, and even if a song like ‘Get Over It’ worked well in Eagles, having a tune that was as freewheeling as ‘How Bad Do You Want It’ made a lot more sense than working on the same-old sentimental schlock all the time.
Henley might not be the best person to pull off the typical party songs by any means, but this was the kind of songwriting that most fans had been missing since the singer stopped working with Joe Walsh. He could still write a great tune, but he just needed a little bit more of a push whenever he started to get a little but too biting.
