The Eagles song Don Henley thinks everyone misunderstood: “It’s very strange to me”
Posted On
(Credits: Far Out / Alamy)
If you are a member of the Eagles, you might be forgiven for thinking that you had a shot at controlling the narrative of your own material. After all, you are one of the biggest bands on the planet with record sales that would be a large percentage of most small countries’ annual GDP. But, alas, the public will do what they want with art, no matter who made it.
No artist can ever control what their audience thinks of their songs. Even though there may be thousands of people singing a track at the top of their lungs whenever they hear it played in public, there are just as many people who have the message fly right over their heads when they turn it on. It’s never easy to spot the meaning behind certain songs, but Don Henley thought that every listener was not paying attention to this Eagles hit.
When looking through the band’s back catalogue, it’s usually easy to decipher what they are getting at most of the time. From the first moment ‘Take It Easy’ came over the stereo, fans were getting a nice blend of country, rock and soul under one roof, with Glenn Frey singing about the wonders of being free from all the hangups of life.
As the band started working on later albums like Desperado and On the Border, though, their subject matter started to change slightly. While they may have had straight-ahead love songs like ‘Best of My Love’ and kissoffs like ‘Already Gone’, a track like ‘Desperado’ had a narrative focus behind it, with Henley singing about a sorry outlaw who will never learn to stop running from his troubles.
Once the band had a landmark achievement with One of These Nights, Henley thought it was time for the band to take their songs up a notch. Kicking off the next phase of their career, ‘Hotel California’ would become the group’s defining moment, telling a graphic story of someone trapped within the Hollywood bubble and can never leave. Although Henley has always been cagey about what the song is about, he does admit that one other single from the album was taken out of context.
Looking to paint a picture of the dangers of Los Angeles, a guitar riff from Joe Walsh helped spawn ‘Life in the Fast Lane’. Written around a title that Frey had picked up from a drug dealer he was driving with on the way to a poker game, Henley helped finish the lyrics about the dangers of living a fast life.
While Henley may have been trying to talk about what happens when a young kid loses their innocence, the rest of the world saw the track as an ode to the rock and roll lifestyle, being happy to live in the fast lane until they drop dead. When discussing the song’s origins, Henley said that glorifying the act couldn’t have been further from the truth.
Looking back on the piece’s legacy, Henley was frustrated with the way people have interpreted the track, saying, “It’s mistaken as a song glorifying that type of lifestyle, when in fact it’s not. I’m just trying to give others the benefit of my experience. We tried to be careful…It’s very strange to me sometimes the way people interpret songs.”
Why does everyone misunderstand ‘Life in the Fast Lane’?
Taken at face value, it is easy to see how an audience could get the wrong end of the stick. A track so neatly aligned with cocaine, fast cars, and rock music is likely not to encourage too much deep thought. Inspiration and origination count and with Henley noting that the hook came from an apparent drug dealer, we should maybe be a little more lenient with those who misconstrued the message.
While the words may have been an indictment of the rock and roll dream, the instrumentation is a different story, with Walsh’s riff sounding like the intro to the most incredible party ever.
However, it wouldn’t be long before the band members began falling prey to those excesses, becoming wired on cocaine during the making of the next album, The Long Run. The James Dean archetype may have been about living fast, dying young and living a good-looking corpse, but ‘Life in the Fast Lane’ is the ultimate example of the dangers of trying to live fast for the rest of your life.
[embedded content]
Related Topics
