Track Premiere | Elegant Bachelors
What’s that thing Keith Richards likes to say about Mick Jagger? “He’s a nice bunch of guys.” I always think of this, when I think of Don Henley, which I do more frequently than I would have imagined as a younger person who found the Eagles irritating. I think I was correct to find them irritating, but underrated the extent to which this was the point: these suave El-Lay-Burrito-Brothers knockoffs were perfectly prepared to annoy. Not for nothing did they end up singing transporting backing vocals on terrifically caustic songs by Randy Newman and Warren Zevon. What they also did—Henley, Glenn Frey, Don Felder (the second Don), Randy Meisner, Joe Walsh, Timothy ever-loving B. Schmidt, the whole wretched cabal—was to smuggle that nastiness into the charts in a way that Newman and Zevon were constitutionally incapable of. Think of the songs and note their glib but compelling presentation. “Already Gone” is about fucking off before some lover does the same, “Best of My Love” practically comes with the terms of service agreement: the best of the Eagles’ love is mediocre. “Hotel California” is about giving up on California before it has given up on itself, all historical detritus of Robert Altman’s McCabe & Mrs. Miller and Hal Ashby’s Shampoo, slathered into six and a half unnervingly enervated, deeply troubling minutes. Is there a meaner turn of phrase in the modern English language than “You can check out any time you like / But you can never leave”? As the sainted Rob Reiner once directed: a little too much fucking perspective.
So—many guys. Sympathetic Don Henley is the hardest Don Henley to parse. As a general rule, he’s a heel, and suited to it: impossibly handsome, impossibly talented, smart and snarky, possessed of a downright irritating cleverness, that does not unsubstantiate the power of his best writing. Plus, he has an undeniable eye for great material. You remember the pumped-up kicks of his 1984 hit “All She Wants to Do Is Dance”? That was actually written by the co-producer of the Building the Perfect Beast album, the legendary Danny Kortchmar, who backed up Carole King and Warren Zevon and Linda Ronstadt and James Taylor, and is a wildly great songwriter of his own accord. “All She Wants to Do Is Dance” is a downright nasty song—brutal even. The bastard child of Zevon’s “Excitable Boy” and the Sex Pistols’ “Pretty Vacant”—a song about the cheap-pop enthusiasms of Reagan’s Morning in America, juxtaposed against the violent and illegal meddling the administration was happily doing in Central and South America. The opening salvo is a synth-pop clinic in malevolent wonder:
They’re pickin’ up the prisoners
And putting ’em in a pen
And all she wants to do is dance!
Also:
Molotov cocktail
The local drink . . .
They mix ’em up right
In the kitchen sink
Also:
Crazy people walkin’ round
With blood in their eyes . . .
Wild-eyed pistol-wavers
Who ain’t afraid to die
The repeating punchline—all she wants to do is dance—echoes and answers Talking Heads’ “Life During Wartime.” “No time for dancing!” David Byrne beseeches, but Kortchmar and Henley know better. Life during wartime is exactly when the dancing begins, or portends, per Cabaret, per the Mekons, per the “loyalty dance” of the Maoist revolution. Per the moment in which we live—blacklists and playlists and the rest of the story.
Henley’s wily too. They say Tom Petty turned down the instrumental demo Mike Campbell offered him of what eventually became “Boys of Summer.” It seems strange that Petty would not perceive the ostentatious brilliance of the song’s foundations, but then again, demos are weird. Maybe it didn’t sound as great as it ended up sounding on Henley’s “Boys of Summer,” which in a stacked class belongs near the very top of any list of the best singles of the 80s. Maybe Henley outsmarted Petty. I don’t know, and don’t think for a second that I don’t think about this stuff. But anyway, Petty wouldn’t have written these lyrics. He was fundamentally too good-hearted in his guarded cynicism, liked America too much to give up on it completely—after all there were American girls, and the Byrds, and the highway and it wasn’t all that bad. To taxonomize the full surrender of the counterculture to the gleaming temple of the high consumer age would require someone far meaner, and with less allegiance to romantic notions of his home. Don Henley was your man. Like “All She Wants to Do Is Dance,” “Boys of Summer” is brutally lacerating, an isolated loser issuing a bitter critique to a former flame and a former way of life, only to desperately want to relive the fraudulent affair again. It’s a perfect song, and no one else can play that tune. Springsteen would have somehow made it feel aspirational. Neil Young would have sounded sarcastic. Henley lays into every line with the coked-out fury of your average 80s Wall Street tycoon: the first spasms of the angry investor class. Buckle up. “Building the Perfect Beast,” indeed.
At age seventy-eight, Henley has long since aged out of his imperial phase, having outlasted the seemingly permanently youthful and hale Glenn Frey by several years, but not the endlessly and joyously desiccated Joe Walsh, if you can figure the randomness of that, of everything. He is slipperier to reckon with. The music business is surprisingly small—Don Henley will never have the vaguest clue who I am—but you meet people along the way: managers, booking agents, sidemen, engineers, roadies, catering people—and they have had experiences of some of the bigger stars and they have stories. You hear what you hear. Henley seems to be a difficult person. My friend Will Sheff, some years back, did a version of “The End of the Innocence” and some other 80s tunes as a deep-catalog, promotional throw-in for one of the Okkervil River LPs. It was reverential enough, but he amended some of the words, made small changes, more specific to the story Will was trying to tell. Henley, incredibly, found out about it and ordered a cease and desist. This despite its miniscule footprint and its utterly benign intentions, this despite Henley’s complete lack of reticence in mining the International Submarine Band or the O’Jays or Bob Dylan or whomever in his own work. The churlishness was astronomical, and pointless. Having benefited in the most profound ways from a two-hundred-year folk tradition of handing off tunes and embroidering on them, he sought to personally end it in the 2000s by legal fiat, interdicting a great songwriter who only wanted to celebrate a great song. If it seemed like anything, it felt self-defeating.
But some ten years plus after the fact, even that episode feels different. When he was sixty-five, it felt like garden variety Baby Boomer bullying, another cash grab à la Irving Azoff, the infamous manager of the Eagles and old-school operator in just about every aspect of the business. But now I wonder if he was just untethered and terribly afraid of the waning of his relevance. The deeper you dive into Henley’s psychology, the fault lines become stranger and more vulnerable. The fourth song on The End of the Innocence album is called “The Last Worthless Evening,” six minutes of moving synth-slop that is like “Boys of Summer” with all of the stuffing beaten out of it. Henley broke up with a girl, or maybe she broke up with him. It’s been two years. He’s been checking out her situation, from time to time, as exes will. He sings, verse one:
I know you broke up with him
And your heart’s still on the shelf
It’s been over two years for me
And I’m still not quite myself
He keeps seeing her around. They are in the same places a lot, I guess. He says:
It breaks my heart
To see you this way
And it’s fairly clear that what he means by this is, it’s a shame not to see you with Don Henley. And then he pitches this sentiment:
This is the last worthless evening
That you’ll have to spend
Just gimme a chance
To show you how to love again
And it should be mentioned, he did a lovely cover of the beautiful Tift Merritt song “Bramble Rose” in 2015, featuring no less than Mick Jagger and Miranda Lambert on backing vocals. A favorite contemporary songwriter of mine, tapped out of the blue for approbation. I think, ultimately, in Henley’s heart, there is a sad cafe. So what’s a person to do? You give him a chance. You hope for a spark or a change. I wrote this song for him, and I expect to be sued. In fact, I would be insulted otherwise. Boys of summer in the dead of winter.
Elizabeth Nelson is a DC-based journalist and singer-songwriter in the band the Paranoid Style. She also hosts the New Pony/Southwest Review podcast Known Associates, where she speaks to fellow writers, artists and musicians. Her new album—also titled Known Associates—will be released on Bar/None Records in February, 2026.
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