The Eagle Has Landed
Don Henley Is Grounded in Family, but Now There's an Album to Promote
Author: Thor Christensen
Publication: The Record
Date: June 5, 2000
Abstract: Henley talks about topics such as how life has changed for him now that he's married and, of course, the environment.
The last time Don Henley put out an album, grunge had just been
invented, Ronald Reagan had just left office, and Britney Spears had just graduated from kindergarten.
But when he sings "A lot of things have happened since the last time we spoke" on his new album, "Inside Job," he's not referring to the state of society or pop music. He's talking about himself.
In the 11 years since he released his last CD,"The End of the
Innocence," the Linden, Texas-raised singer moved from Los Angeles to Dallas, reunited with the Eagles, got married, and had three children.
Those last two events dominate the lyrics on"Inside Job."
"I think it's a more balanced album because my life's more balanced now," he says."I sacrificed a lot on behalf of my career, on the altar of success. But there was a big hole in my life that success and money couldn't fill, and frankly, I got lucky. I got really lucky. And this album reflects that."
The 52-year-old singer is in a modest barn-turned-house, where he stays whenever he's working in Los Angeles. Nestled in the steep hills of Malibu and surrounded by acres of wildflowers, his bucolic spread is exactly the sort of place you'd expect to find rock's most famous environmentalist. The only noise you'll hear is the wind rustling through the trees and the occasional barking of Rufus, his friendly shepherd-retriever mutt.
But the tranquility is deceiving. Henley has been sprinting on the
promotional gerbil wheel.
Within a matter of days, he hosted a Texas-style barbecue for dozens of international journalists, performed a two-hour rehearsal concert, and suffered through one of his most dreaded chores: the photo session.
To borrow the title of one of his new songs, he's "Workin It." And
while his long-overdue "Inside Job" is finally done, the hard job has
just begun. Eight days ago, he launched a concert tour that will run
throughout the year. Thursday, he performs at Radio City Music Hall; Friday, he's at the PNC Bank Arts Center.
Yet his take-it-to-the-limit style of promoting "Inside Job" won't
necessarily make it a hit."The End of the Innocence"sold more than 6 million copies and won him a Grammy for best male rock vocalist, but that was more than a decade ago, a veritable eon in the hyperactive world of pop music. The singer says his "trepidation" about expectations for "Inside Job" is one reason it took so long to make.
"I work a lot on intuition, and I felt in my gut that the kind of
music I make wasn't going to be accepted in '92 or '93," he says.
While he bided his time, he reunited in 1994 with the Eagles, the
Los Angeles-based rockers who split in 1980 amid much bickering. The band's "Hell Freezes Over" tour, titled after a remark Henley once made about the likeliness of an Eagles reunion, lasted two years and drew huge crowds.
But Henley's encore flight with the Eagles wasn't the only thing
keeping his next solo album on the back burner. The 1994 Northridge earthquake destroyed his Los Angeles home, prompting Henley and fiancee Sharon Summerall to move to Dallas, her hometown, and a place where he had lived in the late Sixties. The two married in May 1995 and have since had three children: daughters Annabel and Julia Sophia, and a son, Will.
The shift from rock-and-roll bachelor to family man has also reshaped Henley's music, as evidenced by such optimistic, oft-sentimental songs as"For My Wedding,""My Thanksgiving," "Annabel,"and"Everything Is Different Now."
"When I moved to California, all my musician friends became my family, and that was fine for awhile,"says the singer.
"But I got to the point in my life where having a family was very
important. I'm an only child... and I always had a great longing for a family. But I've also seen a lot of marriages go south, especially in my industry and the film industry, and I've seen the damage that broken homes can do to children. And I was determined not to let that happen to me. So I waited and waited and waited... and as they say, all things come to he who waits."
Yet while domesticity has changed Henley, it definitely hasn't mellowed him. The angry social commentator who gave us "Dirty Laundry" and "Johnny Can't Read" spends almost half of "Inside Job" railing against the ills of modern society.
In the funky, biting leadoff track,"Nobody Else in the World But
You," he rips into all the self-absorbed jerks he sees around Los
Angeles.
"In Los Angeles, civility has pretty much disappeared. The phrase
'excuse me' no longer exists in the lexicon, and I don't want my kids to grow up in that kind of world," he says.
He spends the title track and "Workin It" venting on "corporation
nation-states" which he says are becoming Big Brother-like.
And as you might expect from the founder of the Walden Woods
Project, Henley also sings about the environment on"Inside Job."
"Goodbye to a River,"which he named after Texas author John Graves 1960 book about the Brazos River, deals with the "arrogance" humans show in abusing nature.
"In my work and travel, I have the opportunity to talk to some of
the greatest scientists in this world, and the prognosis is not good," he says.
"There's a frontier mentality in Texas that there's plenty of resources, space, and time, and there aren't. We're now the most
polluted state in the union."
Frustration at what we're doing to the planet is a recurring theme
in Henley's music that dates back to "The Last Resort," his 1976 Eagles tune about the overdevelopment of Aspen, Colo. All this environmental hand-wringing has earned him a reputation as the Chicken Little of rock-and-roll, a relentless doomsayer who, to paraphrase Mojo Nixon's "Don Henley Must Die," needs to lighten up and have a little fun.
"Well, most of my thought-provoking songs, you can dance to," he
says with a laugh. "I'm very careful about that. I don't believe in
boring people to death or sounding pedantic or preachy.
"And long ago, I gave up any delusions about any kind of revolution of music changing the world. We naively thought those things in the Sixties, and those things didn't happen."But I do have proof that songs can make people think and give them a new awareness," he says, referring to the reams of mail he gets from fans who've been affected by his lyrics.
"One of my greatest treasures is this box of letters I have from all
over the world... Those letters make what I do worthwhile, more so than the Grammys or the money or the rest of it. When somebody tells you that a song has profoundly changed his or her life, that's the greatest reward I can get."
