Credits: Sports and Music Photographer via Flickr
Mon 11 August 2025 19:30, UK
How does one learn how to write a pop song? You could easily look at The Beatles’ tunes to write something upbeat, but there’s no way anyone can get their first hit by copying any one band. The audience needs to relate to the person, and Don Henley knew that better than anyone.
Throughout Eagles’ career, Henley was always the one looking at the bigger picture whenever he wrote his lyrics. Nothing he ever did was about talking down to anyone, and even when he did have some preaching to do about the environment or the way Hollywood was looking for, he’s not one to look and pass judgment. He’s really there to observe, but who wants to be spoken to about how what they’re doing is bad?
No one comes to a song to be judged, and while Bob Dylan might be the one person in the world who could get away with something like that, it wasn’t like Henley was always going in that direction. He had ‘Desperado’ under his belt, but there were also songs like ‘Best of My Love’ that were all about his own struggles with romance or his problems with his place in the world on ‘New Kid in Town’.
In fact, most of his personal songs are where fans get that punch in the gut. ‘Wasted Time’ is one of the most depressing breakup songs to come out of country-rock, ‘Boys of Summer’ is a great ode to love lost, and ‘A Month of Sundays’ is a look at the humble farmer watching the love of his life walk away. But have you noticed anything that these songs have in common? None of them depict someone being the most chipper person in the world.
A lot of them are more than a little bit sad, but as far as Henley’s concerned, those are the best kind of songs that people can hope to write, saying, “I think the best songs are sad songs. I don’t enjoy happy little songs. Sad songs, all the great romantic songs throughout history, from Frank Sinatra to Paul McCartney, every great songwriter does his best work writing sad songs. You can only hear ‘You Are My Sunshine’ so many times. On the other hand I could listen to ‘Yesterday’ by Paul McCartney over and over and over again.”
That’s certainly true for someone like McCartney. For someone who seems to be one of the most optimistic men on the face of Earth, some of the most earnest songs that he ever wrote have had to do with the sour side of life, whether that’s processing John Lennon’s death on ‘Here Today’ or his writing as the Beatles were about to break up like ‘The Long and Winding Road’ and ‘Let It Be’.
Which is also half the reason why a lot of great goth acts work so well. People may be turned off by all the black eyeliner that Robert Smith piles on whenever he performs, but his songs of devotion on ‘Just Like Heaven’ still have a better gut punch than any other 1980s song. And while Henley traded in the black eyeliner for a cowboy hat half the time, they all speak the same language.
The best way to get through to anyone is recognising that sometimes life is difficult, and even if a song can’t change that, it at least gives you a friend to help you through it. No one has probably gone through the same thing Henley did in ‘Wasted Time’, but hearing him say goodbye to an old flame is a struggle everyone has had to go through, whether it’s young love or watching people pass on to the other side.
If anything, sad songs are the cheat code for artists to get people to relate to someone. There have been a million songs that have been written where the message is ‘I love you’, but Henley knows that if the subtext of a song is ‘I miss you’ or ‘They broke my heart’, it’s got a much better chance of resonating with people.
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