(Credits: Far Out / NBC Television / Alamy)
Thu 26 March 2026 2:00, UK
Don Henley didn’t sign up to become a world-famous rock star to take everything for granted.
No matter how hard it got for Eagles in the studio, Henley knew that he was going to put in the work every single time to make sure that everything sounded absolutely perfect when they walked out of the studio, even if it meant doing a few unsavoury things behind the scenes. But while the band were some of the masters of great harmonies, not everyone was a fan when they first started hashing out their tunes in their early days.
Because even with all of those harmonies being intact, David Geffen wasn’t particularly impressed the first time he heard them. They had a lot of potential, and while Glenn Frey was clearly going to become a great songwriter with Henley, they weren’t exactly ready to record yet. They needed songs, and so began the rigorous schedule of honing down every track until they felt it was as perfect as it was going to be, like putting together just the right chords on the song ‘Desperado’.
And it’s not like they wanted to hash out any old thing on their records, either. ‘Take It Easy’ may still be one of the breeziest songs ever made, but when you listen to it in context, there’s a lot more going on down to the subtlest syllable that makes it sound great. Henley had grown up listening to the greatest country singers in the world, so he wasn’t going to skimp out when it came to making a few tunes that could stand the test of time.
But their method of musical madness was a lot different from what the Tin Pan Alley side of songwriters was about. They needed to play songs over and over again until they were satisfied with them, and while that practice pissed off Frey to no end when he heard Jackson Browne doing it when they shared an apartment, it was bound to be a lot tighter when they played songs that they had run through countless times.
When they first started to work, though, not everyone was a fan when they first started rehearsing. Anyone would have a chance at running into someone famous in Hollywood, but when Henley first got the chance to rehearse in a major recording space, he remembered people talking about a curmudgeon upstairs that only seemed to want to talk about how things sounded so much better back in his day.
That’s the nature of the beast in recording studios, but Henley was shocked when he found out that it was Hoagy Carmichael, saying, “We’d play music really loud and he would be stomping on the floor. We drove him crazy. We’d say, ‘Who’s that up there?’ and they’d say, ‘That’s Hoagy Carmichael, he’s some grumpy old songwriter guy.’ And I’m like, ‘This is the guy who wrote ‘Stardust’ for Christ sake.’ But he was a grumpy old man in his later years, and who could blame him?”
It’s not like Henley is necessarily wrong with that last comment, either. Here was one of the greatest tunesmiths of yesteryear, and even when he was getting lip service from members of the Beatles when they performed, it wasn’t going to be easy for him to have the same outlook on music when other singer-songwriters only need a decent lyric sheet and a couple of chords to get their point across.
Music didn’t seem to require the same tools that Carmichael had worked with back in the day, but that’s something everyone has to learn when they first begin working in the field. Music has always been about evolution, and if you aren’t willing to work through those obstacles, there’s a good chance that you’re going to fall out of favour with everyone else.
