The crucial career advice Don Henley gave to Sheryl Crow: “You need to hold on”
Don Henley didn’t want to take a single one of his songs for granted.
Everyone usually only has one shot at being one of the biggest stars in the world, and if he had the world as his oyster with the Eagles, he wanted to make sure that he said something that would last a lot longer than he did once he gracefully bowed out of the spotlight. But even if there were plenty of classics in his catalogue, he couldn’t help but see that some of the biggest stars in the world weren’t doing nearly as well as they should have.
Then again, not everyone is looking to be the kind of major songwriter that Henley was. Sure, there are some that want to have the world in the palm of their hand whenever they perform live, but there tend to be a few people that want to stay out of the spotlight. JD Souther was one of the greatest songwriters that Eagles ever worked with, but he was far more content to linger in the background and make tunes that he was happy with than chase after fame.
But when you look at the kind of genres that Eagles spawned, it’s hard to think of anyone that would have reached the spotlight without the right tunes. Their influence on both rock and roll and country music can’t really be denied, and a lot of the best rootsy rockers were bound to follow in their footsteps, whether it was John Mellencamp singing about his hometown or Billy Joel admiring Henley from afar when writing about his own experience growing up in Long Island.
And while the next generation of singer-songwriters were still punching above their weight class, it wasn’t like all of them were going to get on the charts all that often. Say what you want about how great the song ‘Walking in Memphis’ is, but Marc Cohn seemed to be far more content to occasionally work with legends like Jackson Browne than try to trouble the charts again in the age of grunge. So when someone like Sheryl Crow came out of the woodwork, she seemed like a breath of fresh air.
For most rock stations at the time, the most mellow acts that they had were probably either R.E.M. or Counting Crows, so hearing tunes like ‘Everyday is a Winding Road’ and ‘All I Wanna Do’ was like seeing a rootsier version of someone like Stevie Nicks debuting. Crow was definitely poised to become a superstar, but after she started giving her tunes to people like Eric Clapton, Henley felt that she wasn’t doing nearly as much as she could when working on her own albums.
She was still making classics, but Crow remembered the Eagle telling her not to waste any of her material by giving them away, saying, “I had a song covered by Celine Dion and a song covered by Tina Turner. I had a song that Eric Clapton had on hold. He was going to record it, so they put it on hold so nobody else can record it. That was when Don Henley said, ‘You need to quit giving your songs away. And if you’re serious about this, you need to hold on to your songs for yourself.’”
Granted, if any other songwriter had been able to make a song that Celine Dion could appreciate, they would have been over the moon. It’s not the worst thing in the world to find someone else’s voice to suit any of your songs, but Henley’s advice is the same reason why Tom Petty had to keep ‘Don’t Do Me Like That’ for himself instead of giving it away to the J Geils Band back in the 1970s.
Any songwriter is only looking to get their material out to as many people as possible, but when you put something on hold with a specific artist, the song doesn’t really belong to you anymore. So if you have something that you feel has the potential to become one of the biggest songs of your career, you’re better off following Henley’s advice and recording the whole thing by yourself.
