(Credits: Far Out / Don Henley)
Mon 9 February 2026 19:25, UK
The best Eagles records ever made were never going to make it without Don Henley looking over everything.
He may not have been the perfectionist that everyone claimed he was behind the scenes, but when they were slowly inching towards becoming the biggest band in the world, he was never going to sit around the studio and settle for good enough whenever they started fine-tuning their masterpieces. He wanted to make sure that they gave everything whenever the tape started rolling, and he had no time for the kind of musicians who were in it for the glory over everything else.
The main reason why Eagles got together in the first place was to have the perfect California rock band, and Henley and Glenn Frey were already handpicking everyone in the group. No one was going to get into the band if they couldn’t play some of the best rock and roll that anyone had ever heard, and it wasn’t out of the ordinary for them to swap out different people if the time called for it, either.
Bernie Leadon never wanted to be a part of a rock and roll outfit, so trading in his country licks for Joe Walsh’s roaring guitar was bound to be a shot in the arm. Even when Frey tragically passed away, bringing in Vince Gill to carry his tunes is the best choice they could have made, especially for someone who could give Walsh a run for his money in the shred department whenever he performed live.
But after the band broke up, Henley was much more interested in turning his voice up. He could be a bit more critical every single time Eagles came out with a new record on tunes like ‘The Last Resort’ and ‘The Sad Cafe’, but the fangs were bound to come out after making tunes like ‘Dirty Laundry’ and ‘The Garden of Allah’. He wanted to call out the injustices of the world, and that also applied to some of the plastic people at the top of the food chain.
After all, the band got back together with a tune all about the phoniness of Hollywood on the song ‘Get Over It’, so it wasn’t out of the question for Henley to continue going down that road. It was important to balance a song like ‘Frail Grasp on the Big Picture’ with a few lighthearted tunes, but as the music world entered the 2000s, Henley felt that there was a point in dwelling on what pop starlets like Britney Spears were doing.
As far as he could tell, he was looking at a star falling back down to Earth, and he got infuriated watching every single reporter talking about celebrities like Spears 24/7, saying, “Obviously, there are still people out there who are trying to do a good job and trying to keep some integrity in the work. But for every one of those people, there are 20 or 30 more that are just in it for… I don’t know what. Again, that is part of the cultural junk. That’s what’s appalling to me. I don’t really want to hear any more about Britney Spears, I don’t really want to see the train wreck.”
Granted, there was at least a silver lining to Spears’s situation later on in life. Henley couldn’t have known about the conservatorship that she was going through at the time, but after breaking free from the control of her father, the world got to see the ugliness that Henley had only hinted at in his songs and how justice can be served by the corrupt pieces of the Hollywood system.
It might have looked like a trainwreck at the time, but the music world wasn’t always about rewarding the fat cats at the top. Henley had spent his entire career trying to call out the biggest injustices of the world, but if Spears could avoid the trainwreck that Henley had seen coming, maybe there was room for the rest of the industry to turn over a new leaf.