{"id":545826,"date":"2026-04-23T04:02:09","date_gmt":"2026-04-23T04:02:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/545826\/"},"modified":"2026-04-23T04:02:09","modified_gmt":"2026-04-23T04:02:09","slug":"the-1970s-songwriter-don-henley-said-the-eagles-surpassed","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/545826\/","title":{"rendered":"The 1970s songwriter Don Henley said the Eagles surpassed"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Don<\/p>\n

Credits: Sports and Music Photographer via Flickr<\/p>\n

Thu 23 April 2026 2:00, UK <\/p>\n

Don Henley<\/a>\u00a0didn\u2019t want to settle for being in another decent rock and roll band when the Eagles started.\u00a0<\/p>\n

He wanted the chance to take their brand of rock and roll to the top of the charts and stay there for the rest of their lives, and since Eagles\u2019 greatest hits records are still selling in droves, it\u2019s not like he and Glenn Frey didn\u2019t achieve everything they set out to do back in the day. They had become one of the biggest bands in the world, but that didn\u2019t mean they got respected in the same way that their contemporaries did.<\/p>\n

I mean, for one thing, the band\u2019s songs weren\u2019t exactly competing with the hard rockers of the world. Bands like Led Zeppelin were being treated like outlaws of rock and roll history, and even though they weren\u2019t the greatest hit with the critics, either, most of the rock and roll faithful would have gladly taken the riffs of \u2018Whole Lotta Love\u2019 over having to deal with a bunch of country rockers working their way through \u2018Desperado\u2019.<\/p>\n

But what Henley was doing was a lot closer to heartland rock years before that genre even had a name. His slice-of-life stories and tales of American folklore were emerging just around the same time that people like Tom Petty were coming on the scene, but it looked like every single music snob was convinced that the future of rock and roll lay in people like Bruce Springsteen instead of the California rockers.<\/p>\n

And it\u2019s not like they didn\u2019t have a good reason to think that, either. \u2018The Boss\u2019 was quickly becoming one of the biggest names in the world thanks to Born to Run, and while it took him years to break out of the \u2018new Bob Dylan\u2019 mould, you could tell that he was in it for all the right reasons. He was telling stories of people that his audience seemed to know personally, but compared to Eagles, Henley felt that what he was doing was a lot more rootsy than what his Jersey counterpart was doing.<\/p>\n

Henley knew he and Frey had a good thing going, and he wasn\u2019t going to admit that \u2018The Boss\u2019 was better than them, saying,<\/a> \u201cPeople talk about Jackson [Browne\u2019s] lyrics, but they don\u2019t seem to talk about ours. It\u2019s not that they don\u2019t look at us as good songwriters, but they just seem to emphasise the ones that were hits rather than the ones that weren\u2019t. I think our songs have more to do with the streets than Bruce Springsteen\u2019s.\u201d<\/p>\n

Granted, it\u2019s not like Henley doesn\u2019t have a small point. A lot of the hatred or indifference towards Eagles usually came from their biggest hits, but even when they were at the height of their fame, those songs didn\u2019t tell the full story. \u2018The Last Resort\u2019 is one of the finest lyrics<\/a> that Henley ever wrote at the tail end of Hotel California, and when he ventured into his solo career, he was still concerned with making songs about the everyman, even going so far as to venture into Springsteen\u2019s territory on \u2018New York Minute\u2019.<\/p>\n

And it\u2019s not like Frey couldn\u2019t get a few jabs in when he wanted to, either. There was never any concrete feud between Eagles and Springsteen, but considering how much buzz \u2018The Boss\u2019 was getting around that time, Frey couldn\u2019t see why Bob Seger wasn\u2019t doing just as well on the charts as Springsteen was, with Frey saying that he had a lot more to do with what everyday Americans were going through. <\/p>\n

It\u2019s really up to the fans to decide whether or not Henley is right about being better than Springsteen, but it was never about any sense of competition. Every songwriter wants to make the best tunes that they can, and it\u2019s up to them to work their way into fans\u2019 hearts by telling the stories that they grew up living.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

ADD AS A PREFERRED SOURCE ON GOOGLE \"\"\/ <\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Credits: Sports and Music Photographer via Flickr Thu 23 April 2026 2:00, UK Don Henley\u00a0didn\u2019t want to settle…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":518929,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[15738,30948,27602,96,128,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-545826","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-music","8":"tag-bruce-springsteen","9":"tag-don-henley","10":"tag-eagles","11":"tag-entertainment","12":"tag-music","13":"tag-uk","14":"tag-united-kingdom","15":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/545826","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=545826"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/545826\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/518929"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=545826"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=545826"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=545826"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}