Between his work with the Eagles and his solo career, Don Henley has carved out an impressive space near the top of the world of music. To his credit, he has realized, more than many other artists of his stature, that finding the right collaborators can make all the difference. As the Eagles prepare to embark upon their Long Goodbye Tour, it’s a perfect time to look back at all the times that Henley, the group’s sole remaining original member, found another musician and made wildly successful music together with them.
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Glenn Frey
The Henley/Frey songwriting partnership ranks up there with Lennon/McCartney, Jagger/Richards, or any other writing duo you could name in terms of impact and success. It’s a little bizarre to think that it took them a while to connect in that manner, even after they’d been working together for years, first as members of Linda Ronstadt’s backing band, and then as Eagles. Take a look at the credits for the Eagles’ self-titled debut album in 1972, and you’ll find that there are no Henley/Frey co-writes. But when they made their next album, Desperado, the following year, Frey helped to shape a song Henley had begun years earlier, and it became the legendary title track. From that point, Henley and Frey created hit after iconic hit for the band that came to define both country rock and West Coast rock in the ’70s.
JD Souther
Much like Henley and Frey, Souther was a talented musician and songwriter blessed with a golden voice. Although he mostly released music on his own (the massive 1979 hit “You’re Only Lonely” being perhaps his most famous song), he was an invaluable contributor to several key Eagles tracks. He first appeared with the Eagles as a co-writer of “Doolin’ Dalton” from Desperado. A year later, Souther helped Frey and Henley work out the lovely ballad “Best of My Love,” which became the group’s first No. 1 hit. When Henley went solo, he kept Souther on speed dial, and it proved to be a wise idea. Souther and Henley collaborated on the lyrics to a plaintive piece of music contributed by Mike Campbell for Henley’s 1989 album, The End of the Innocence. The result was “The Heart of the Matter,” one of the finest ballads of the decade.
Danny Kortchmar
Henley’s most consistent collaborator in the ’80s, Kortchmar performed a number of different roles on those three wonderful solo albums—I Can’t Stand Still, Building the Perfect Beast, and The End of the Innocence—multi-instrumentalist, co-producer, co-writer, even sole writer, most notably for the 1984 hit single “All She Wants to Do Is Dance.” Henley told In The Studio about the trust that he placed in Kortchmar, or “Kooch,” as he’s affectionately known in the music world: “Sometimes nowadays – and I don’t know if this is good or bad, but it seems to work – Danny will simply deliver me a cassette with a musical track on it and I’ll just take it home and write it by myself, either in the car or at my house. I’ll just play the music, and I can tell in the first couple of minutes if I can write a song – if it will pull a concept out of me. I have a bank of ideas in my head that I want to talk about, and I can either overlay that onto a piece of music or I can’t.”
Mike Campbell
Many people know Campbell as the lead guitarist for Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, but his songwriting contributions (mostly composing the music while Petty wrote the lyrics) include some pretty iconic TP hits, such as “Refugee,” “Here Comes My Girl,” and “You Got Lucky.” But his most famous music was one that Petty turned down for being a little too synth-heavy. Campbell handed it off to Henley, and it inspired Henley to come up with a set of lyrics about lost love and lost innocence. That song, of course, was “The Boys of Summer,” which might be Henley’s most enduring solo track. A few years later, Campbell rang up Henley mentioning he had another unreleased piece of music he might use, and that became (with help from JD Souther) “The Heart of the Matter.”
Bruce Hornsby
As was the case with “The Boys of Summer,” Henley’s 1989 smash single “The End of the Innocence” came from a piece of music that was shunned by another musician. But in this case, the shunning was done by the composer himself, Bruce Hornsby. In 1987, Hornsby was riding high off the success of “The Way It Is,” his No. 1 single with the Range. He received a call from Henley to ask if we wanted to write, and, as Hornsby told Performing Songwriter, he gave Henley a leftover track he had written that didn’t thrill him too much. “I’d written a song with this music but I didn’t think it was great, so I gave him the track and it seemed to spark something in him right away. He left the house and he was listening to the cassette in the car and I think he called me down the road. And End of the Innocence is the outside collaboration that I’m the most proud of.”
Patti Smyth
Quick trivia question: What was the top-charting song on which Henley was featured outside the Eagles? You might have guessed one of the solo songs mentioned above, but you’d be wrong. In fact, it was “Sometimes Love Just Ain’t Enough,” a duet with Patty Smyth that rose to No. 2 on Billboard’s Hot 100 in 1992. Smyth had sung backing vocals for Henley on his ’80s albums, and when she and Glen Burtnik put together what they thought was a killer ballad, they asked Henley to return the favor and sing backup. It eventually became a duet at the suggestion of the song’s eventual producer Roy Bittan, keyboardist for Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band. You can read all about the song’s wild history HERE.
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