The two songs Don Henley wants to be remembered for: “Especially proud”
Don Henley never sought out to be a typical pop songwriter when Eagles began.
He had already been working on some of the best country tunes with Linda Ronstadt, and all of those taught him that the greatest compositions had to tell a story behind everything, so he wasn’t going to be singing the typical silly pop song.
If you look through all of Henley’s work with Eagles and beyond, it’s always been about getting to the root of living and what we’re all doing this for anyway. There are some tunes that are slightly more abstract like ‘Witchy Woman’, in the mix as well, but some of the greatest moments of his career often come from when he’s talking about the real problems in the world, like ‘Life in the Fast Lane’ or a love that’s gone sour like ‘Best of My Love’.
With Glenn Frey to bounce ideas off of, Henley was always building to something, and ‘Hotel California’ was the first time he combined both of his lyrical sensibilities under one roof. There was a lot of that fairy-tale imagery within that fictional hotel, but it’s not like that place can’t be a metaphor for Hollywood in general. Henley had seen what the business looked like at that point, and he figured that the band’s namesake track should peel back the curtain a little bit on the business that’s known for chewing people up and spitting them out far too often.
But at the same time, that left him with a huge problem once he went solo. Sure, Eagles’ greatest hits were in the rearview, but how the hell was he going to be able to top what he had already done. The best he could hope for were songs like ‘Dirty Laundry’ touching on the same gossip template, but once he found his voice on ‘Boys of Summer’, he realised there was hope for him to grow up as a rocker.
No rule said he had to give it up once he passed 35, and The End of the Innocence was the first time that people got a look at the most mature version of Henley. He had a lot on his mind on tracks like ‘New York Minute’ and the title track, but ‘The Heart of the Matter’ was the first time that he hit upon the kind of lyric he had been searching for for far too long.
When talking about the track, guitarist Mike Campbell remembered Henley saying how happy he was able to finally flesh out the idea, saying, “I know he was especially proud of that one. He told me that lyric was something he had been trying to write for a long time, and it finally came out the way he liked it, something he really wanted to sing.”
Then again, not everyone can write a track like ‘The Heart of the Matter’ without putting a few scars on their heart as well. He may have had some help with the lyrics from JD Souther, but a song centred around asking for forgiveness from his former partner, even if it means losing them forever, can only come from someone who has spent time doing a lot of soul-searching to figure out the kind of person that they want to be.
That’s probably what makes both ‘Hotel California’ and ‘The Heart of the Matter’ so important in Henley’s songwriting career. Both of them were written well after he had made it as a musician, but if the Eagles’ signature track came from an artist taking a long, hard look at the music industry, ‘The Heart of the Matter’ is the sound of Henley taking a hard look at himself and wondering what he could have done differently in a relationship.
