“An important song to me”: The song that saved Glenn Frey’s relationship with Don Henley
Being a good songwriter is a lot like riding a bike half the time. Even though it’s hard getting past those first few classics, the main way to preserve it is to keep practising until there’s that one song that blows away every single person that hears it. When you don’t practice for a long time, though, it’s bound to be rusty, but Glenn Frey realised that before he even started working with Don Henley.
He had already begun writing his own tunes when he started playing with his startup bands in Detroit, and when working with Bob Seger, he was given an education as to what a great song needs to have to get on the radio. So while he was still finding his feet in Los Angeles, he at least had something to work off of other than being a hapless kid with an acoustic guitar in his hands.
When he meshed with Henley, though, Frey found a confidante who could finish his sentences. It would take them a little while to hone their craft during the first few years of Eagles, but when they started writing tunes like ‘Desperado’ and ‘Tequila Sunrise’, there was a different sound they hadn’t heard before. It was in the same vein as the country-rockers they had been playing with, but there was a lot more lived-in experience in their writing that could have to do with Henley’s background studying English at school.
Any band might like to wind themselves down before they take a break, but by the time Frey called everything off with the group, his entire partnership with Henley seemed to fracture with it. Both of them were capable of making tunes on their own with their mutual friends like JD Souther and Mike Campbell, but listening to Frey’s singles, it was clear that something was missing compared to when Henley would sing ‘All She Wants To Do Is Dance’.
So when the call came back for them to get back together, Frey was the first one who was reluctant. The band were always perfectionists when they got into the studio, so if they were going to release any new material, how the hell were they going to make something even half as good as ‘Heartache Tonight’ or ‘Hotel California’?
“During The Long Run, our creative relationship became strained. ‘Get Over It’ showed us that we could get together and write again.”
Glenn Frey
It was a massive challenge when they started making Hell Freezes Over, but Frey credits the song ‘Get Over It’ as the one tune that helped save his creative relationship with Henley, saying, “We got together at his place up the coast and wrote it. Whether it’s the best song we’ve ever written or not, it was the song that proved to us that we could write together again. During The Long Run, our creative relationship became strained. ‘Get Over It’ showed us that we could get together and write again. For that reason, it’s an important song to me.”
While a lot of the song does have pieces of Henley’s late-1980s sound sprinkled into it, most of the lyrics still feel like listening to the older, wiser version of the band. There’s no telling who wrote which line in the song, but listening through the track, it’s easy to find Henley quoting Shakespeare when talking about ‘Billy’, and the idea of a line talking about finding someone’s inner child and kicking their ass feels like it can only come from someone born and raised in the Motor City.
But this tougher, angrier version of Eagles wasn’t exactly meant to stay around for too long, either. They were simply happy to be working together again, and if that meant finding common ground by putting adult infants in their place for complaining on TV, that was more than enough to work with.
