{"id":57211,"date":"2025-08-10T08:05:10","date_gmt":"2025-08-10T08:05:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/57211\/"},"modified":"2025-08-10T08:05:10","modified_gmt":"2025-08-10T08:05:10","slug":"the-one-lyric-don-henley-wrote-as-a-little-dig-at-his-fans","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/57211\/","title":{"rendered":"The one lyric Don Henley wrote as “a little dig” at his fans"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Don<\/p>\n

(Credits: Far Out \/ Derek Russell)<\/p>\n

Sat 9 August 2025 19:00, UK <\/p>\n

Don Henley<\/a> knows his fans are why he\u2019s a music legend. <\/p>\n

He and Glenn Frey wrote fantastic songs, but what made them special is the millions of people singing them ever since the 1970s. But that didn\u2019t mean that his fans couldn\u2019t get on his nerves occasionally when he made new music.<\/p>\n

After all, the biggest hurdle any artist has to deal with is themselves whenever they go in to make a new record. There\u2019s always that lingering pressure of making sure that any song, album, or guitar lick can compete with what you came up with in your prime, and while Henley was up to that challenge, it got a bit more challenging when he started working on his solo career without the rest of his bandmates. <\/p>\n

There\u2019s a lot of shared responsibility that comes with being in a group, but now that Henley was on his own, anything wrong would be squarely directed at him. And while he was ready to receive such criticism, there was no doubt he would be the biggest solo star of Eagles. He had the golden voice before the band even broke up, and when listening to albums like Building the Perfect Beast, even Frey<\/a> had to admit that what his old bandmate was doing was absolutely fantastic.<\/p>\n

But ever since the remaining Eagles reformed, Henley has always straddled the line between being a solo artist and a band member. Long Road Out of Eden was a great return to form, but an album like Cass County was much closer to Henley\u2019s soul. Every song carried on the tradition of perfect American music, be it from the world of country, rock, or anything else that struck Henley\u2019s fancy at the time.<\/p>\n

If he were on his own, he was going to take a few liberties when writing songs like \u2018No Thank You\u2019. The entire album is a bit mellower than much of the stuff that Henley had made before, but this song kicks everything off in style, with a driving guitar riff over Henley\u2019s words about feeling content with life. The tune may be about his happiness with his place in the world, but there was a little criticism for his fans in one of the verses.<\/p>\n

After the fact, Henley admitted that the song \u201ctakes a little dig\u201d at the kind of people who only want to hear the same thing out of him whenever he performs. In an interview later, he said he needed to remind everyone about his need to move on, saying<\/a>, \u201cThe point is that it\u2019s okay to look back, you just don\u2019t want to live back there. You look back in order to see where you\u2019ve been so that you can appreciate where you are now, and maybe where you\u2019re going.\u201d<\/p>\n

And throughout most of the album, it was about Henley wanting to live in the here and now a lot more. The problems that he had in the 2010s writing Cass County were a lot different from the ones that he had when writing tunes like \u2018The Heart of the Matter\u2019 and \u2018New York Minute\u2019, and while those songs still resonate well over the years, it\u2019s easy to fall into a holding pattern with them as well. <\/p>\n

It would be easy to call Henley selfish for wanting to play new music over his hits, but it\u2019s all a matter of him being realistic. No one can have the same values they set for themselves decades before, and even if they did, perspective changes a lot when looking through eyes that have seen different parts of the world. <\/p>\n<\/p>\n

Related Topics<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"(Credits: Far Out \/ Derek Russell) Sat 9 August 2025 19:00, UK Don Henley knows his fans are…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":57212,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[64,63,47112,134,136],"class_list":{"0":"post-57211","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-music","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-don-henley","11":"tag-entertainment","12":"tag-music"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57211","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=57211"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57211\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/57212"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=57211"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=57211"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=57211"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}