Eagles Album / Time with Stevie, hmmm??

[RonJonSurfer]

Henley Interupts Eagles Album to Tour With Nicks

Scott Mervis - Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

"(The recording of the new Eagles album is) going quite well. We're all very pleased - surprised even. I think everybody in the group is surprised about how well it is going and how well we're getting along, and how everybody is stepping up to the plate, you know. So we're just going to keep recording. We might record enough material for two albums. I don't know."

That was Don Henley talking back in March ... 2002.

Now, it's 2005 and the last Eagles album was still in 1979.

This was, after all, the band that gave us "Take it Easy." But group members have done plenty of that: So what's up with this Eagles record?

"We've been recording Eagles material for the last four or five years and putting it away in the vaults," says Henley.

"But we've been away so much we haven't had a chance to complete a lot of it. The other big factor is that we're all married and have children. ... Whereas the Eagles were once our main priority, I think our families are our priority now."

So how many songs would he say they've recorded and finished?

"I think only one or two of them are finished out of 15 or 16," he says.

"We don't feel a great deal of pressure to finish anything," Henley says. "We're not signed to any particular label. I think the primary impediment has been the touring. ... And there is the fact that we are competing with our legacy, our former music. We all agree that if we can't make a record that we think measures to the standards that applied in the '70s, then we'd just as soon not do it."

Henley adds that it doesn't help that he lives more than a thousand miles away from the other members. Eleven years ago, he left L.A., where he co-founded the Eagles in 1971, and returned to Texas, settling in Dallas, a little to the west of Linden, where he was born and raised.

Henley - whose image is so tied to the bronzed Californian, hair slicked back and shades on - enjoys a daily life that consists of waking up at 6 a.m., getting his kids (girls 5 and 9, boy 7) ready for school, hitting a local coffee shop, gardening, working out and dealing with office work regarding everything from the Eagles to the Walden Woods Project to a revitalization of the courthouse in his hometown.

He has a recording studio at the house, but with all that other stuff going on, the songs don't come easy.

"It never came easy," he says. "There are certain instances where Glenn and I wrote a song in a matter of three or four days. Like the song 'Lyin' Eyes,' for instance. 'Desperado' was something that evolved over a span of four or five years. I started that song in 1968, before I even met the other guys in the band. ...

"The key to songwriting," he says, "is to try to eliminate distractions and to concentrate and to focus. That has become more difficult as the years go on."

Henley has always liked to collaborate. He co-wrote with Glenn Frey in the Eagles, and, as the Eagle with the most successful solo career (with Top 10 hits like "Dirty Laundry," "The Boys of Summer," "All She Wants to Do is Dance" and "The End of the Innocence"), he's co-written with producers and artists like Bruce Hornsby and Danny Kortchmar.

"I'm not a musical island. I like to collaborate because it gives variety to the material and takes me in places that I wouldn't be able to go myself."

Henley's last solo record was "Inside Job" in 2000, and now, he says, "I have some things in the can."

For now, he's put all of those projects on hold while he does a quick tour with Stevie Nicks, with whom he recorded the hit "Leather and Lace" for her first solo record in 1981.

In August, he'll hook up with the Eagles again for a West Coast tour. Asked if playing classic Eagles songs remains fresh for him night after night, he laughs and says, "Depends on how far into a tour we are. The audience makes it fresh every night. Sure, we get tired of some of these songs sometimes. Some of these songs we've been doing for 33 years. But when the lights go down and we walk out onstage and the cheers go up from the audience, it's a brand-new world every night."

Upcoming tour schedule (dates subject to change):

June 11 - Henley/Nicks, Post-Gazette Pavilion, Burgettstown, Pa.

June 13 - Henley/Nicks, Giant Center, Hershey, Pa.

June 16 - Henley/Nicks, Gwinnett Center, Duluth, Ga.

June 18 - Henley/Nicks, DTE Energy Music Center, Clarkston, Mich.

June 19 - Henley/Nicks, Tweeter Center, Tinley Park, Ill.