(Credits: Far Out / Don Henley)
Sat 4 April 2026 20:00, UK
The whole point behind any song for Don Henley was about trying to paint a picture with words.
Many kids of his generation picked up a guitar or a drumstick in the hopes that they would be understood by their peers, but even when looking at Henley’s greatest works, there are a thousand different ways that someone can interpret a song like ‘Hotel California’, even if they’ve been playing it nonstop for five years. But even if it was easier to digest a song like ‘Take It Easy’, Henley felt that some of the best songwriters of all time are too distinct for anyone to truly comprehend.
At the same time, it’s not like Henley was following the more eclectic bands every time he sang or anything. He wasn’t looking to become the next David Bowie when he teamed up with Glenn Frey to put together the Eagles, but he was interested in those who told gripping stories. Jackson Browne wrote fantastic songs, and you could see the heart of America in everything that Bob Seger wrote, but Randy Newman was something different when Henley first laid ears on his music.
This was still singer-songwriter music, but it was never easy to pin down anything that Newman ever wrote from one album to the next. The whole point of his records was to keep challenging himself with the music that he wrote, and even when he was making music for children’s films, the fact that he incorporated New Orleans-style jazz into Monsters Inc is still one of the most bonkers ideas that anyone has ever had at Disney Entertainment.
But those songs were about writing on commission, and some of Henley’s best tunes tended to be centred around the kind of stories that no one could have got away with telling. ‘Rednecks’ is a song that speaks a lot of truth, but depending on what part of the US you find yourself in, there are more than a few times where someone could get shot at because of how pointedly he talks about racism.
And for Henley, that kind of bravery and eclecticism is what put Newman in a world of his own, saying, “[His albums] contain songwriting and musicianship of tremendous scope and skillfulness. No one has written more beautifully about love and loss. No one has written more bravely about racism and religion and politics and war. No one has written with as much humour about lust and greed and the family dynamic. And yet the general public only seems to remember Randy as the guy who wrote that song about short people.”
Then again, that’s part of the beauty of what makes Newman so great. His songs weren’t meant to be looking for the same kind of chart hits that you would expect out of any other pop star, and yet some of the greatest musicians of all time usually came back to his music because it was simply too good to pass up. ‘I Love LA’ was what got everyone’s foot in the door, but they were in for a whole cavalcade of stories once they heard the rest of his records.
Eagles were already working on their songwriting dynamic around that time, but it wasn’t going to be hard for Henley to step up his game when he heard Newman. Many of his greatest songs in his solo career are about trying to paint the same character portraits as Newman, and even if they tend to have a moral lesson at the end of everything, his songwriting teacher was far more likely to make people that were a little less savoury than what Henley was writing about.
That’s not exactly a bad thing, but some of the best Newman songs have that eclecticism that used to make old Steely Dan songs so great as well. Not all of the people that populate his albums are necessarily the best moral characters by any stretch, but if you bother to listen to their stories for just a little bit, you’re bound to have the tiniest bit of sympathy for them by the end of the song.
