Who is Eagles song ‘The Best of My Love’ about?
‘The Best of My Love’ is a song that will always have a special place in the hearts of Eagles fans and band members alike. The group’s first real hit went all the way to number one on the Billboard Hot 100. Its sweet sentiments about romance gone by and yearning chorus made all the more arresting by sublime backing harmonies, earned them their shot at superstardom.
Although the writing of the song was thrashed out at a table in the band’s favourite Italian restaurant, Dan Tana’s, it carried a more personal meaning for the band’s drummer and co-leader, Don Henley. Glenn Frey might have supplied the main melodic line based on a guitar tuning he’d learnt from then-girlfriend Joni Mitchell. But the lyrics and the feelings behind them were all Henley.
It’s Henley who takes the lead vocal part for the song, singing fondly of a relationship “coming apart at the seams”, which was worth cherishing all the same. “Here in my heart” is where his former lover remains, despite what might have gone wrong to inspire the song in the first place.
In Marc Eliot’s biography of the band To The Limit: The Untold Story Of The Eagles, Henley claims he was feeling “a lot of guilt and remorse” over a breakup at the time he wrote the song’s lyrics. In fact, the breakup in question fuelled most of his writing on the band’s third album, On the Border.
So, who had Henley broken up with?
Suzannah Martin was the girlfriend who Henley had allegedly cast aside in favour of aspiring actor Lorelei Shellist. Martin was arguably the Eagles’ songwriting last low-profile relationship, as he moved squarely into the limelight following the success of On the Border and its follow-up LP One of These Nights.
Within a year of getting together with Shellist, Henley began dating Fleetwood Mac vocalist Stevie Nicks after her break-up with longtime musical collaborator Lindsey Buckingham. Nicks wrote Fleetwood Mac’s 1979 single ‘Sara’ about Henley. Or, more specifically, the unborn child they could have had together if Nicks didn’t have an abortion.
Perhaps Martin really did experience the best of Henley’s love, at least for a while, as his subsequent romances never seemed to last. That is until he married model Sharon Summerall in 1995. The two have been together for almost 30 years now and have two children.
But Henley’s first publicised love affair still resonates today. It might have slipped away, but Suzannah Martin clearly kept a piece of her heart, which will be enshrined forever in ‘The Best of My Love’.
