(Credits: Far Out / Steve Alexander)
Sat 10 January 2026 15:55, UK
Every one of the Eagles prided themselves on having some of the best voices California had ever seen. No one gets into a band with someone like Linda Ronstadt and is expected to just plonk away on their instruments, so someone like Glenn Frey had to be put through his paces when it came time to deliver just the right vocal inflexion for every chorus he ever wrote. Despite his work with Ronstadt and solo, he still considered Don Henley to be the finest singer that he came across.
Then again, the fact that Henley could sing that way at all is half the reason why the Eagles were a successful group in the first place. They were technically Frey’s band in the early years, but when you think about how many songs he wrote with Henley over the years, it reads like a treasure trove of music.
For instance, let’s do an inventory of the songs that are from their greatest hits package. Considering his presence at the front of the stage, Frey does have a few classics to his name, like ‘Lyin’ Eyes’ and ‘Take It Easy’, and he even managed to get more sleeper hits from the group onto the radio, like ‘Already Gone’.
Randy Meisner even had an inclusion on ‘Take it to the Limit’, but the rest of their best songs belong to Henley. Discounting some of the more under-the-radar hits like ‘New Kid in Town’, everything from ‘Desperado’ to ‘Witchy Woman’ to ‘Hotel California’ all came from Henley’s voice, usually making the most of his tenor voice despite being a natural baritone.
Although it was completely natural for the group to shift the vocals around every time they made a record, Frey had no problem calling Henley the absolute best of them, saying in Life in the Fast Lane, “Don Henley is the rock, along with being the greatest singer that I’ve ever worked with. Randy is the perfect ribbon on the package.”
Don Henley can also play guitar. (Credits: Far Out / Don Henley)
It’s not often you get a drummer who also takes on the responsibility of lead vocals, though the Eagles’ Don Henley is a man who has done just that. And, what is perhaps most impressive of all, is that he has done it better than most traditional singers. Henley’s vocal is like pure butter.
The archetypal rock sound, he manages to feel powerful and vulnerable in consecutive notes and delivers a sense of beautiful poetry with his performances. It’s the kind of balanced performance that turned Eagles from just another band into one of the best-selling groups the world has ever known. It captured the mind of his bandmate, Frey.
In fact, Frey ended up liking Henley’s voice so much that he almost made an attempt to write other members of the band out of the songs. When discussing replacing Don Felder’s vocal on ‘Victim of Love’ with Henley’s, Frey even threw himself under the bus regarding lead vocals, telling History of the Eagles, “If you look at [that period], I sang less and less. It was intentional. We had Don Henley.”
Then again, Frey might not give the other members enough credit regarding their group harmonies. While no one would tread on the thin ice of claiming that Joe Walsh was the greatest singer in the band, having every one of their voices harmonising on ‘Seven Bridges Road’ or ‘No More Walks in the Wood’ from their final album remained one of the biggest thrills of their career even up until Frey’s passing in 2016.
Even after the band split up, it’s no surprise that Henley would be the breakout star of the group, sharing the solo spotlight alongside Walsh when making classics like ‘The End of the Innocence’ and ‘The Boys of Summer’. The primary focus of any Eagles album is normally to pay attention to the harmonies, but if you had to break down the technical ability of every singer, everyone not named Henley was bound to be competing for second place.
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