“It gave me closure”: The song Joe Walsh said helped heal his soul
There’s no way to escape listener fatigue whenever taking to the road. Any artist can love the sound of their own voice and talk themselves up as one of the greatest musicians of their generation, but there comes a point during any tour where songs tend to bleed together or start sounding like complete mush if no one puts any emotion into what they’re doing. But for Joe Walsh, there are some songs that hit far too close to the bone to ever see the stage for too long.
Throughout his time with the James Gang and his solo career, Walsh had become the class clown of rock and roll in many respects. He knew how to put together a perfect melody to get people listening, but when he flew off the handle, he could make any band kick into high gear whenever they played in front of an audience, which is probably why Don Henley and Glenn Frey scooped him up for the Eagles.
Because it’s not like the California rockers were struggling without Walsh, they had been going strong as one of the best singles bands in town, but by getting him in the group, they had their resident court jester who could bring some levity to their sets. There were bound to be some long faces in the crowd after one too many ballads, so hearing songs like ‘Funk #49’ or ‘Rocky Mountain Way’ would have broken up the monotony of everything.
But the only way for him to bring some levity was having to go through some pure pain along the way. He had already experienced the raw terror of being present during the Kent State shootings in the 1960s, and despite being one of the biggest party animals of the 1970s, everything was bound to come to a halt the minute that one of his family members got hurt along the way.
While Walsh wasn’t home, his daughter, Emma, was killed in a car accident in 1974. Walsh had been in the middle of writing his next album, So What, and despite many of the songs being upbeat, everything grinded to a halt the minute that ‘Song for Emma’ comes on, which acted as a way for him to air out all of his feelings of guilt and sorrow for not being there for his daughter when she passed away.
“I wrote a song for her on my album So What. It’s called ‘Song for Emma’, and it was a kind of goodbye to her. That song was good because it gave me closure on it, and I could move on.”
Joe Walsh
Looking back on it, Walsh said that the song eventually acted to heal the wounds left over from that tragedy, saying, “I wrote a song for her on my album So What. It’s called ‘Song for Emma’, and it was a kind of goodbye to her. That song was good because it gave me closure on it, and I could move on. I think of her often, and she was a good little kid. Having had that experience, sometimes I am in a position to be able to comfort people.”
But before he had joined his new band, some of his buddies were already by his side. During the recording of the album, Don Henley and Glenn Frey had come in to turn in some time on backing vocals, and given how well their voices blend, Walsh sounds like he’s being supported by a choir of angels when going through one of his worst periods of his life.
Anyone who had gone through such a tragedy could have decided never to play music again, but the fact that Walsh found the strength to keep going is a testament to the kind of musician he was. He could have spent the rest of his days living in the shadow of this massive tragedy, but he figured that music was going to be the one thing helping him through the darkest chapters of his life.
