Every songwriter finds something that moves their pen. Whether it be heartache or anger or something in between, there is that one worthy cause that instills a sense of creativity into our storytellers. For Don Henley, that cause is often environmentalism. Take the Eagles’ “The Last Resort,” for example. Henley put all his frustration about commerce destroying the environment into this song. It packs quite the punch in its nearly eight-minute runtime. Uncover the meaning behind this song below.
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Behind the Meaning of the Eagles’ “The Last Resort” – “When We Find Something Good, We Destroy It By Our Presence”
She came from Providence
One in Rhode Island
Where the old world shadows hang
Heavy in the air
She packed her hopes and dreams
Like a refugee
Just as her father came across the sea
And they called it paradise
I don’t know why
Somebody laid the mountains low
While the town got high
Like many of the Eagles’ best songs, “The Last Resort” follows a visceral narrative. Henley is a deeply visual songwriter and has no trouble placing his listeners into a particular place and time. “The Last Resort” takes us on a journey, set on the precipice of a new industrial outlet. Henley’s main character moves in search of “paradise,” only to find it destroyed by humans and their drive to build and succeed. Somebody laid the mountains low / While the town got high, the lyrics read.
Elsewhere in the song, Henley tackles the migration from the East to the West and the impact it had on Native Americans. Like the environment in the earlier verses, unyielding industry caused the collapse of a culture.
Henley was deeply moved by these topics. You can tell by how passionately he wrote about them here. He once called this track one of his favorite songs.
“‘The Last Resort’, on Hotel California, is still one of my favorite songs,” Don Henley once said. “That’s because I care more about the environment than about writing songs about drugs or love affairs or excesses of any kind. The gist of the song was that when we find something good, we destroy it by our presence – by the very fact that man is the only animal on earth that is capable of destroying his environment.”
“The environment is the reason I got into politics: to try to do something about what I saw as the complete destruction of most of the resources that we have left,” he added. “We have mortgaged our future for gain and greed.”
Revisit the powerful and consequential “The Last Resort” by the Eagles, below.
They even brought a neon sign
“Jesus is coming”
Brought the white man’s burden down
Brought the white man’s reign
Who will provide the grand design?
What is yours and what is mine?
‘Cause there is no more new frontier
We have got to make it here
(Photo by Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images)
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