The one singer Don Henley called his greatest influence: “More than anybody”
Don Henley was never going to give his audience the kind of cookie-cutter music that everyone expected.
He wanted to keep people guessing every single time he worked on a record, and while the Eagles did make pitch-perfect music, Henley figured that there was a lot more going for them than just being a decent pop-rock act. They had a lot to say with their time in the spotlight, and a lot of that brutal honesty came from Henley learning from some of the greatest songsmiths in the industry.
That said, it’s not like Henley could translate everything into gold whenever he made a record. His voice is capable of doing a lot of things, but when looking at some of his favourite composers that came before him, he knew that he could never catch the kind of cunning wit that Randy Newman had. He wasn’t built for that, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t try doing something new every single time he made a record.
After all, some of his biggest writing influences were known to shift themselves every now and again, and Bob Dylan was already teaching a clinic in how to remain enigmatic. Here was one of the greatest songwriters of all time in the 1960s, and yet half of his greatest moments were when he went on a completely different tangent. Henley liked that kind of unpredictability, but he also felt that it would be better to keep the music the way it was.
The lyrics were what needed to change, and you could hear him getting more mature as the Eagles went on. A lot of their old songs were about them trying to figure out what they were going to be, but by the time they landed on a record like Hotel California, Henley had taken everything he set out to do and made a perfect comment both on the music industry and what America would be heading towards if no one straightened themselves out.
A lot of that came from listening to the biggest folk singers of yesteryear, but Henley knew he wouldn’t be playing today were it not for The Beatles. Every single musician from his generation was hit by a bolt of lightning when they heard them on The Ed Sullivan Show for the first time, and when Henley heard them, he was floored by the way that John Lennon fleshed out as a songwriter.
Lennon was never one to tiptoe around difficult subjects, and his ability to be cut and dry is what made him so interesting for Henley, saying, “I admired John Lennon more than anybody in the music industry. I loved his voice, I loved his sense of humor — his dry wit. I loved the songs he wrote, the lyrics he wrote. I loved what he stood for, what he believed in, everything about him, really. He was a great influence on me.”
It’s one thing to admire the voice, but Lennon was usually the one trying out different spaces within his writing as well. He was interested in seeing where his muse would take him half the time, and even though not everything worked out the way that it should have on every single record, it was well worth it for him to have a legacy to be proud of, even if it was cut tragically short when he passed away.’
Henley may not have made choruses that sound exactly as good as Lennon’s, but he was proud to carry on the legacy of songwriters who had so much more to offer than the occasional catchy tune. He wanted people to think a little harder with his music, and that came from Lennon doing the same thing when he challenged the conventions of what a pop singer could sound like back in the day.
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