11 questions for Don Henley of the Eagles

Mark Brown, Rocky Mountain News

Published October 29, 2007 at midnight

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After a 28-year layoff the Eagles on Tuesday will release "Long Road Out of Eden," a double-disc that sound like the band had never been away. Original songs are accompanied by songs from the band's past — writers J.D. Souther and Jack Tempchin are in the mix, as they were in the early days. You can buy it through Wal-Mart or EaglesBand.com, and that's the only way you'll hear it — the band is taking a year's break from touring. Co-founder Don Henley spoke recently by phone with Rocky pop music writer Mark Brown about the long recording process, his dissatisfaction with the final product and why members don't want to see each others' faces for a good long while.

1. We've talked about this album so many times over the past 10 years and now it's finally here. It's so much better than I expected it to be. I figured it wasn't going well.

Henley: "It wasn't going well for three or four years. Most of this album came together in the past couple of years. Once we got the (fired guitarist Don) Felder thing out of the way, the depositions stopped and all that sort of thing, that was a big distraction. Yeah, It's a pretty good album. It could have been better. I was willing to continue but the powers that be said you gotta give it to us now. There were three or four songs that weren't finished. I'm frankly of the opinion it should have been a single album, a single disc. Some of the songs on there should have been removed. But I lost that battle."

2. So why a double disc?

"I guess so everybody could have his say, everybody could get his licks in. Some of the other band members had a lot of songs and wanted them all on there."

I wonder who you could possibly be talking about.

"(Laughs). It was just band crap, you know? So you have to compromise. There are three or four songs on there that shouldn't be on there, but there was nothing I could do about it."

3. Did you even recall doing the J.D. Souther song "How Long" in the early days of the band?

"No. Somebody said ‘You can go on YouTube and see this live performance you guys did in Holland in 1973.' I went on and looked at it. I'd forgotten we'd ever done it. Glenn (Frey) has got the memory of an elephant so he remembered that. It was Glenn's decision to do that song. We wanted to go full circle. It's good to progress as an artist — groups like the Beatles certainly took us on a journey. But in other respects we wanted to circle back to the beginning. This will probably be our last album and we wanted something that sounded like the early days. And that does. It sounds like Take It Easy" and "Already Gone"."

4. The album has a truly Eagles sound. How did you do that?

"That was intentional. We went into the project with that consciousness. It's an intuitive thing. You just have a gut feeling. We wanted something to show off our harmony singing. So I came up with "No More Walks in the Wood". In the early days we used to start our show with an a cappella piece, a traditional folk piece called "Come All Ye Fair and Tender Ladies". We used to walk out, sing that, then go into on "Take It Easy." Then we did "Seven Bridges Road" and people really loved that. So we were looking for something like that. I stumbled upon this poem in the Oxford Dictionary of American Poetry and turned it into that piece. We did make some conscious moves in that direction. In the end it's all intuitive. You can't really make it happen. It comes down to songwriting and song choices. Our goal on this album was to write and to find the best songs possible. That's the foundation of what we do. Always has been."

5. When artists work on an album for this long it tends to be overproduced. How did you avoid that?

"We were into taking stuff off. We loaded some of these tracks up and we'd go ‘Nah, that's too much. Better take some of that off.' I basically produced my stuff and Glenn basically produced his stuff. We teamed up on the other stuff. We spread the pie around a little more this time. It just works out better that way. You've got to give other people the ball sometimes. I'm all for that."

6. Three of your songs are very pointed politically – "Long Road Out of Eden, Frail Grasp of the Big Picture" and "Business as Usual". Does it come from your same sense of dissatisfaction with world events?

"I'm a news junkie. I read a lot of periodicals. They're the same things we've been talking about for a long time. I think these songs are more fully realized. I think we said it better this time – as you say, more pointedly. It'll be interesting to see the reaction we get. We're all trying to do what everyone else is doing — we're trying to make sense of this crazy world. This is how I do it. As I've said before, this is what keeps me off the shrink's couch. I get to put it all into these songs.

People call it anger and cynicism and all that crap but it's not what it is really. I'm just as hopeful as anyone else. I have three small children. I'm just concerned about the future of the planet. There has been social criticism in songs since the beginning of time. "Long Road Out of Eden" and "Frail Grasp on the Big Picture" . . . I love to write those kind of songs. I think they're a good counterbalance to all the sappy romantic stuff that's on there. The one good thing about having a double disc is we got to cover a lot of territory subject-wise. I like that."

7. What does this do to your set list? You've got great new songs to play but everyone will want to hear the old stuff.

"We're doing an interesting thing at these (promotional) gigs. We're coming out and playing four new songs in a row, which was Glenn's idea, which I don't necessarily agree with. It's interesting to see the reaction. The first couple of songs they're pretty enthusiastic. Then I think they think we're going to play the whole album and they freak out. Glenn's thinking is if we do them early in the show before they get drinking and get tired we'll have their attention a little bit longer. I'm excited about what this'll do for the set list. Much as I love the old songs we really need some new material to play. This just adds to the body of work. That's what I'm most proud of with this band. We have a body of work. We just added a lot to it."

8. But you're not touring after these promotional shows?

"We need to get away from each other for a while. We've been locked in a studio . . . we just need to take a break from each other. We need to give these songs time to sink in. It's a bold and cocky move to go out and play four songs that nobody has ever heard. But I don't' want to make a habit of that. I'd rather have people get familiar with the album. It'll be a lot more fun to play them when there's a sense of recognition coming from the audience instead of puzzlement. We don't have any plans to tour. We've been talking about maybe touring next fall. I've got some solo stuff I want to do. Glenn's stepping into the George Hamilton role in some musical in New York City. That should be interesting. We refer to the group as the mothership. We can go off on our excursions and then we can come back to the mothership."

9. You've been criticized for selling your disc through Wal-Mart. Do you worry that they're taking advantage of you? You happen to have something they want.

"They've got something we want as well and that's distribution. We sat down and looked at the entire picture. Some people are trying to use the Internet, with, so far, not a lot of success. Some are signing to the indie labels, which aren't really indie. Other people are signing with certain coffee companies and there's not much success happening there. We just said ‘How can we get the most CDs out there to the most people and give them good value for their money?' One of the good things is this is going to cost $11.88. Wal-Mart came to us with this offer. Our deal with them expires in a year. Then the CD can be sold in other outlets. We did keep the online rights. We've taken a lot of flack for it by people who don't like us anyway. It's easy to sit outside the circle and throw rocks if they're only marginally informed . . . people have been crying out for a new paradigm. So we did something new. You're gonna get criticized for it. I'm certainly aware of Wal-Mart's track record and their problems, but they're mounting a serious effort to do something about it."

10. You mentioned solo projects. What do you have in mind?

"I owe Warner Records two more albums."

11. Can't you just wait till they go out of business?

"(Laughs). Yeah, I could. But I have a lot of things I want to do. I want to make an autobiographical album about the south, my upbringing in east Texas. I want to record it down there. I want to make an album of original material. I also want to make an album of what I call new standards. You have all these people recording the same old songs from yesteryear. I happen to think there's a new body of work form Randy Newman and Leonard Cohen and Elvis Costello that if recorded properly and chosen well would serve as a modern version of that kind of standards. I have a lot of plans. I'm going to have to live a very long time to get this done in the midst of parenting."

The Eagles

• Long Road Out of Eden,

Eagles Records

Grade: A-

A new Eagles studio release laboriously produced nearly three decades after their last one? That's a recipe for disaster. So it's a genuine pleasure to find that the two discs are a mix of great Eagles- sounding cover songs, sharp originals, gorgeous harmonies and a good dose of Joe Walsh guitar.

Glenn Frey's vocal on Somebody growls with menace and paranoia, and a ballad for his daughter, You Are Not Alone, is heartfelt and touching.

Don Henley again takes the lead in social commentary. Frail Grasp of the Big Picture looks at failures from global politics to personal relationships, lambasting politicians and the same egocentric jerks who populated earlier songs like Those Shoes.

You can't say which Eagles album it sounds like, because it sounds like all of them; you can hear pieces of The Long Run, Hotel California and Desperado throughout. It has its excesses — the minute-long intro to the already-long title cut is disposable, as are a couple of extraneous cover songs like I Love To Watch a Woman Dance — but fans of the band's classic work will find plenty of pleasures.

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