(Credits: Far Out / TIDAL)
Mon 1 September 2025 18:30, UK
Cover songs are notoriously a risky business. Unless they’re done well, most people hate them. Don Henley has a clear vision of how they should be – everything else is just purely offensive.
Although on rare occasions, it can be done, a cover song being better than the original is extremely rare. Most people fail at the first hurdle, which, according to Joni Mitchell, all comes down to emotion.
“It’s not like [playing a character]. It’s, you know, the words to the song are your script,” she once said. “You have to bring the correct emotion to every word. You know, if you sing it pretty – a lot of people that cover my songs will sing it pretty – it’s going to fall flat. You have to bring more to it than that.”
As one of the most-covered musicians in history, you can understand her struggle. Most Mitchell covers either focus too heavily on the vocal delivery or pay too much attention to the arrangements, with a hefty amount of the original emotion getting lost somewhere along the way. It was the same issue for people like Prince, though he was ready to burn the world to the ground at the mere mention of anyone taking his songs as their own.
In his opinion, people didn’t treat things like television shows and movies with the same offence, and it just didn’t make sense. “There’s no other art form where you can do that,” he explained. “You can’t go and do your own version of Harry Potter. Do you want to hear somebody else sing ‘Kiss’?” Most people would agree – of course nobody can cover a song like ‘Kiss’. Unless your name is Sinéad and you’re Irish, anyone attempting a Prince song will surely fall flat.
Although fiery in a considerably less forthcoming way, Don Henley has never seemed a big fan of covers himself, either. He actually probably seems to many like the least conflicting or confrontational person in the world, but a couple of cover songs along the way have ignited that lingering bitterness in him, the worst of these appearing when he first heard Okkervil River’s version of ‘The End of the Innocence’.
In this scenario, it wasn’t just that Henley thought their version was poor; it was that they changed some of the original song’s lyrics. He was so furious, in fact, that he took them to court over it, saying their song “wasn’t an improvement. We were not impressed. So we simply had our legal team tell them to take it down, and they got all huffy about it.”
Weirdly, Henley also said something strangely reminiscent of Prince’s Harry Potter remark, going even further with his condemnation of anyone who tries to cover songs. “We work really really hard on our material,” he said. “We spend months writing it and years recording it. You don’t go into a museum and paint a moustache on somebody else’s painting. Nobody would think of doing that.”
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