Don Henley Ready to Build on Storied Solo Career with Two New Solo Albums

Don Henley, the veteran rocker best known as a founding member of The Eagles, is still going strong and recently announced plans to put out two new solo albums. Henley has not put out a solo album of new material since 2000's Inside Job. The interesting twist to Henley's latest career plans is that one will be country and the other an R&B effort.

Henley in the past has described the Eagles, for whom he was arguably the most important member, as a "musical mutt" in that they borrowed from and influenced a wide variety of music.

In some ways, this helped make the Eagles the ultimate American band as their songs were a bit of a melting pot of styles and influences.

While they are often described as "country rockers", the Eagles' later albums lost much of the country influence that characterized their earlier work. In fact, their biggest song of all time, Hotel California, infuses rock and reggae, but with no country sensibilities at all. Through the years, the Eagles borrowed and influenced diverse genres ranging from country (Peaceful Easy Feeling) to harder edged rock and roll (Life in the Fast Lane) to R&B (Heartache Tonight) and even, gasp, disco (One of the These Nights).

When the Eagles disbanded in the early 1980's, Henley went on to the most successful solo career of any of their individual members and began to experiment in subtle but unmistakable ways on his solo efforts. While some of his 1980's output sounds dated, he released three albums during the decade that far surpassed the Eagles work critically, though not commercially.

His debut solo album, I Can't Stand Still, featured some work that could even be considered new wave; this from a rocker who at the time was fighting off irrelevance as musical tastes shifted from the mostly mellow and guitar driven Eagles towards angrier punk music and technology driven arrangements.

Through it all, though, Henley had a knack for avoiding the 'flavor of the week' designation while still capturing the zeitgeist. Ironically, the single Dirty Laundry, which was his first solo hit, seems a bit dated musically today, but lyrically was probably ahead of its time, as it berated the press and media for sensationalism and for featuring 'bubble headed bleach blondes' instead of serious news reporting. It's a song that somehow fits into a time capsule while proving very prescient about what was to come.

In 1984, Henley released his second solo album, Building the Perfect Beast, which sold over 4 million albums and featured the blockbuster and enduring hit Boys of Summer.

Now about five years removed from the Eagles, Henley seemed to both be singing as much about his relationship with fame, the Eagles, their fans, and the baby boomer generation as he was about a real life love interest. Most of the album is synthesizer driven and while it can be fairly said to be a bit over-produced, Henley has produced what Rolling Stone Record Guide called a "damn near perfect pop album".

With his next effort, The End of the Innocence, Henley was, for a brief while, one of the biggest rock stars in the world. Mostly anonymous as the singing drummer of the Eagles, Henley was now selling out mid-sized arenas on his own and while he would never quite reach the level of Bruce Springsteen in terms of fame or number of fans, he was clearly one of the very few examples of a member of a super group breaking away and becoming stars in their own right. Really, only Sting, Paul McCartney and Phil Collins (ironically another signing drummer) could be said to have at least equaled Henley's solo success after leaving a mega band.

The 1990's, though, saw what now seems to be the inevitable reunion of the Eagles and for the past sixteen years, Henley has mostly stayed safe and made imaginable amounts of money through touring. A new Eagles album, Long Road out of Eden, was released in 2008, and met with mixed reviews, but the Eagles mostly exist now to tour and sell out stadiums across the country. As Henley is 63 now, and the rest of the Eagles all in their early 60's, their days of touring on the scale they are end before another 16 years pass.

The eventual end of the Eagles may actually be welcomed news to Henley fans. While the Eagles are one of the most powerful and popular bands in rock and roll history, many critics and fans were disappointed that his once promising solo career, which was on the verge of exploding in 1989, eventually took a back seat to rehashing the Eagles experience.

The news that Henley is thinking new musical output is welcomed to rock and roll fans hungry for a familiar voice and style underpinning new musical directions and output. While no dates have yet to be announced, Henley says he is anticipating an early 2011 release for the country album, with the R&B album coming later in the year or in 2012.

Sources:

To the Limit: The Untold Story of the Eagles
MSNBC
My Desert.com